Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing managers.

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.

Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.

What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?