Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts—and that is a very good thing.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.

The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.

When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth.

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

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.

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.