Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.