《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》经典读后感10篇
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》是一本由Thomas Piketty著作，Belknap Press出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 39.95，页数：696，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(一)：资本和收入集中的关系
Capital in the 21st Century 年初正式出版，受到的赞誉之多之盛已足以使其成为政经史领域无法绕过的又一个堡垒( 英文近700页，法文近1000页)。
作者从发达经济的历史数据出发，以“资本积累”作为分析的切入点，建立了一个收入分配趋于集中的模型。有学者称其为“资本主义通论”，皆因此书实为阐述资本主义发展的内在逻辑。
但作者声明，他的理论不是对“收入集中”的唯一经济解释，甚至历史上某些时期，收入集中程度更多受政治因素的影响，该理论只是指出经济体内部存在一种收入集中趋势，这种趋势会导致社会不稳定，也没有天然的制约机制。
模型里的一个核心变量是“资本存量”和“收入总额”的比率。在资本回报率高于收入增长速度，即经济增长速度，的前提下，该比率会不断上升，并导致收入分配向资本倾斜。给定资本收入比劳动收入更加集中于少数人，那么整个社会的收入不平等就会加剧。
作者还提出的“继承经济”的概念。可以继承的、高度集中的私有资本达到一定规模（6-7倍于社会总收入），通过婚姻继承财产可以获得数十倍于终身打工的收入，因此工作就变得没有吸引力了。这就是《理智与情感》和《高老头》里描述的社会。绅士和淑女们获得更好的教育多是为了嫁/娶豪门。
本书算是专业读物，但作者也同时写给只要不是“看到数字就跑”的读者。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(二)：All men are created unequal- The Economist
Revisiting an old argument about the impact of capitalism
Jan 4th 2014 | From the print edition
INEQUALITY is one of the most controversial attributes of capitalism. Early in the industrial revolution stagnant wages and concentrated wealth led David Ricardo and Karl Marx to question capitalism’s sustainability. Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the “Great Compression” that followed the second world war. But a modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed.
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, is an authoritative guide to the question. Mr Piketty’s book, which was published in French in 2013 and will be released in English in March 2014, self-consciously builds on the work of 19th-century thinkers; his title is an allusion to Marx’s magnum opus. But he possesses an advantage they lacked: two centuries’ worth of hard data.
The book suggests that some 20th-century conventional wisdom was badly wrong. Inequality does not appear to ebb as economies mature, as Simon Kuznets, a Nobel-winning economist, argued in the 1950s. Neither should we expect the share of income flowing to capital to stay roughly constant over time: what another economist, Nicholas Kaldor, labelled a key fact of economic growth. Mr Piketty argues there is no reason to think that capitalism will “naturally” reverse rising inequality.
The centrepiece of Mr Piketty’s analysis is the ratio of an economy’s capital (or equivalently, its wealth) to its annual output. From 1700 until the first world war, the stock of wealth in Western Europe hovered at around 700% of national income. Over time the composition of wealth changed; agricultural land declined in importance while industrial capital—factories, machinery and intellectual property—gained prominence. Yet wealth held steady at a high level (see chart, first panel).
re-1914 economies were very unequal. In 1910 the top 10% of European households controlled almost 90% of all wealth. The flow of rents and dividends from capital contributed to high inequality of income; the top 10% captured more than 45% of all income. Mr Piketty’s work suggests there was little sign of any natural decline in inequality on the outbreak of the first world war.
The wars and depressions between 1914 and 1950 dragged the wealthy back to earth. Wars brought physical destruction of capital, nationalisation, taxation and inflation, while the Great Depression destroyed fortunes through capital losses and bankruptcy. Yet capital has been rebuilt, and the owners of capital have prospered once more. From the 1970s the ratio of wealth to income has grown along with income inequality, and levels of wealth concentration are approaching those of the pre-war era.
Mr Piketty describes these trends through what he calls two “fundamental laws of capitalism”. The first explains variations in capital’s share of income (as opposed to the share going to wages). It is a simple accounting identity: at all times, capital’s share is equal to the rate of return on capital multiplied by the total stock of wealth as a share of GDP. The rate of return is the sum of all income flowing to capital—rents, dividends and profits—as a percentage of the value of all capital.
The second law is more a rough rule of thumb: over long periods and under the right circumstances the stock of capital, as a percentage of national income, should approach the ratio of the national-savings rate to the economic growth rate. With a savings rate of 8% (roughly that of the American economy) and GDP growth of 2%, wealth should rise to 400% of annual output, for example, while a drop in long-run growth to 1% would push up expected wealth to 800% of GDP. Whether this is a “law” or not, the important point is that a lower growth rate is conducive to higher concentrations of wealth.
In Mr Piketty’s narrative, rapid growth—from large productivity gains or a growing population—is a force for economic convergence. Prior wealth casts less of an economic and political shadow over the new income generated each year. And population growth is a critical component of economic growth, accounting for about half of average global GDP growth between 1700 and 2012. America’s breakneck population and GDP growth in the 19th century eroded the power of old fortunes while throwing up a steady supply of new ones.
Victorian values
Tumbling rates of population growth are pushing wealth concentrations back toward Victorian levels, in Mr Piketty’s estimation. The ratio of wealth to income is highest among demographically challenged economies such as Italy and Japan (although both countries have managed to mitigate inequality through redistributive taxes and transfers). Interestingly, Mr Piketty reckons this world, in which the return to capital is persistently higher than growth, is the more “normal” state. In that case, wealth piles up faster than growth in output or incomes. The mid-20th century, when wealth compression combined with extraordinary growth to generate an egalitarian interregnum, was the exception.
ustained rates of return above the rate of growth may sound unrealistic. The more capital there is, the lower the return should be: the millionth industrial robot adds less to production than the hundredth. Yet somewhat surprisingly, the rate of return on capital is remarkably constant over long periods (see chart, second panel). Technology is partly responsible. Innovation, and growth in output per person, creates investment opportunities even when shrinking populations reduce GDP growth to near zero.
ew technology can also make it easier to substitute machines for human workers. That allows capital to gobble up a larger share of national income, raising its return. Amid a new burst of automation, wealth concentrations and inequality could reach unprecedented heights, putting a modern twist on a very 19th- century problem.
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(三)：The more you think about it, the more it makes sense
I've been trying to make sense of all that happened around us ever since I got into the university, and of course the explanation couldn't have been simpler. The propaganda of meritocracy is particularly disgusting exactly because of its incredibly unabashed hypocrisy. We ain't no fortune sons and there ain't no future for us. What's more depressing for us is that from what we can all see, China is rapidly becoming another United States in various aspects, long having left its "people" nowhere. Extreme libertarianism nutcases like Peter Thiel can clamor all they want, but their vision is far-removed from the reality and the only end for such an order they envisioned is collapse, revolt and chaos all over again. Of course the analyses and proposals of the author please a social liberal like me a lot, but it's exactly the seemingly impossible nature of them in light of recent state of affairs around the world that makes the situation seem more grim and hopeless. Well after all such a lull of relative peace we've been enjoying in the past decades has always been a rare sight in human history. We won't exactly be surprised if something as violent as the two world wars break out again to wipe things clean, only for the cycle to restart itself. I guess we'd have to admit that all the so-called social ideals will either never fully work or serve as pretenses to something totally different, human beings being human beings on a whole. Still, for now I'd still rather search for somewhere which is purportedly more aligned to my ideals, and explore/contrast how things really work out there, just to grasp the truth better.
The book itself is actually quite wordy. Took me more than a month to finish the 25-hour audiobook. The author mostly has already laid out his observations/assertions in the very beginning, and a large part of the book just went on to support them with rambling historical data/analysis. His proposals to solve the issues were only presented in the very last part. So you can very well just skim the first and last parts to get the general idea. Still, the historical accounts were mostly intriguing and informative, so if you have time and are not averse to listening to some leftist preaching, I recommend finishing the whole book.
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(四)：21世纪资本论
作者用600多页的鸿篇论述了一个妇孺皆知的道理：富人越来越富，穷人越来越穷，富人比穷人变富的速度快——r＞g：在很长时间内，资本的回报收益都比收入和产出的增长要快……
下午正好在学“回归分析”，老师说多元回归的第一步就是从可能的原因中找出有显著影响的原因。我当时在想，如果是有限的三个五个原因还好说，如果是宏观经济，影响的原因岂是几组数据或是模型就能说清楚的。那些数据不容易表现的，或是人们根本不觉得是原因的原因，又怎么知道不是它们产生了显著影响呢？
刚刚看到结论部分，作者也有类似的观点。经济学不是一门与社会历史割裂的学科，它的复杂性也是魅力在于时刻都受到政治历史进程以及许多未知因素的影响，而影响的对象是成千上万真实的人的命运。一边冷面无私地处理数据，一边热血沸腾地面对众生，应该是经济学家也是所有社会科学从业者该有的态度。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(五)：BOOKSFORCES OF DIVERGENCEIs surging inequality endemic to capitalism? BY JOHN CASSIDY
OOKSFORCES OF DIVERGENCEIs surging inequality endemic to capitalism？
Y JOHN CASSIDY
MARCH 31, 2014
RINT
MOREIf current trends continue, Thomas Piketty sees “potentially terrifying” consequences.If current trends continue, Thomas Piketty sees “potentially terrifying” consequences. Illustration by Michael Gillette.
KEYWORDS
INCOME INEQUALITY; “CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY”; THOMAS PIKETTY; BOOKS; ECONOMICS; CAPITALISM; WEALTH
In the stately world of academic presses, it isn’t often that advance orders and publicity for a book prompt a publisher to push forward its publication date. But that’s what Belknap, an imprint of Harvard University Press, did for “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a sweeping account of rising inequality by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Reviewing the French edition of Piketty’s book, which came out last year, Branko Milanovic, a former senior economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.” The Economist said that it could change the way we think about the past two centuries of economic history. Certainly, no economics book in recent years has received this sort of attention. Months before its American publication date, which was switched from April to March, it was already the subject of lively online discussion among economists and other commentators.
iketty, who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, has spent nearly two decades studying inequality. In 1993, at the age of twenty-two, he moved to the United States to teach at M.I.T. A graduate of the élite École Normale Supérieure, he had recently completed his doctorate, a dense mathematical exploration of the theory behind tax policies. Plenty of bright young European scholars move across the Atlantic, of course, and many of them end up staying. Piketty was not to be one of them. “It was the first time I had set foot in the United States,” he recalls in the introduction, “and it felt good to have my work recognized so quickly. Here was a country that knew how to attract immigrants when it wanted to! Yet I also realized quite soon that I wanted to return to France and Europe, which I did when I was twenty-five. Since then, I have not left Paris, except for a few brief trips.”
art of Piketty’s motivation in returning home was cultural. His parents are politically engaged Parisians who took part in the 1968 riots. When he was growing up, his intellectual role models were French historians and philosophers of the left, rather than economists. They included members of the Annales school, such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, who produced exhaustive analyses of everyday life. Compared with this scholarship, much of the economics that Piketty encountered at M.I.T. seemed arid and pointless. “I did not find the work of U.S. economists entirely convincing,” he writes. “To be sure, they were all very intelligent, and I still have many friends from that period of my life. But something strange happened: I was only too aware of the fact that I knew nothing at all about the world’s economic problems.”
In Paris, he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research, and, later, the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where some of his heroes had taught. The main task he set himself was exploring the hills and valleys of income and wealth, a subject that economics had largely neglected. At first, Piketty concentrated on getting the facts down, rather than interpreting them. Using tax records and other data, he studied how income inequality in France had evolved during the twentieth century, and published his findings in a 2001 book. A 2003 paper that he wrote with Emmanuel Saez, a French-born economist at Berkeley, examined income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1998. It detailed how the share of U.S. national income taken by households at the top of the income distribution had risen sharply during the early decades of the twentieth century, then fallen back during and after the Second World War, only to soar again in the nineteen-eighties and nineties.
FROM THE ISSUEBUY AS A PRINTE-MAIL THIS
With the help of other researchers, including Saez and the British economist Anthony Atkinson, Piketty expanded his work on inequality to other countries, including Britain, China, India, and Japan. The researchers established the World Top Incomes Database, which now covers some thirty countries, among them Malaysia, South Africa, and Uruguay. Piketty and Saez also updated their U.S. figures, showing how the income share of the richest households continued to climb during and after the Great Recession, and how, in 2012, the top one per cent of households took 22.5 per cent of total income, the highest figure since 1928. The empirical work done by Piketty and his colleagues has influenced debates everywhere from Zuccotti Park, the short-lived home of Occupy Wall Street, to the International Monetary Fund and the White House; President Obama has said that tackling inequality and wage stagnation is our foremost challenge.
The question is what’s driving the upward trend. Piketty didn’t think that economists’ standard explanations were convincing, largely because they didn’t pay enough attention to capital accumulation—the process of saving, investing, and building wealth which classical economists, such as David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, had emphasized. Piketty defines capital as any asset that generates a monetary return. It encompasses physical capital, such as real estate and factories; intangible capital, such as brands and patents; and financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. In modern economics, the term “capital” has been purged of its ideological fire and is treated as just another “factor of production,” which, like labor and land, earns a competitive rate of return based upon its productivity. A popular model of economic growth developed by Robert Solow, one of Piketty’s former colleagues at M.I.T., purports to show how the economy progresses along a “balanced growth path,” with the shares of national income received by the owners of capital and labor remaining constant over time. This doesn’t jibe with modern reality. In the United States, for example, the share of income going to wages and other forms of labor compensation dropped from sixty-eight per cent in 1970 to sixty-two per cent in 2010—a decline of close to a trillion dollars.
iketty believes that the rise in inequality can’t be understood independently of politics. For his new book, he chose a title evoking Marx, but he doesn’t think that capitalism is doomed, or that ever-rising inequality is inevitable. There are circumstances, he concedes, in which incomes can converge and the living standards of the masses can increase steadily—as happened in the so-called Golden Age, from 1945 to 1973. But Piketty argues that this state of affairs, which many of us regard as normal, may well have been a historical exception. The “forces of divergence can at any point regain the upper hand, as seems to be happening now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he writes. And, if current trends continue, “the consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying.”
In the nineteen-fifties, the average American chief executive was paid about twenty times as much as the typical employee of his firm. These days, at Fortune 500 companies, the pay ratio between the corner office and the shop floor is more than two hundred to one, and many C.E.O.s do even better. In 2011, Apple’s Tim Cook received three hundred and seventy-eight million dollars in salary, stock, and other benefits, which was sixty-two hundred and fifty-eight times the wage of an average Apple employee. A typical worker at Walmart earns less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year; Michael Duke, the retailer’s former chief executive, was paid more than twenty-three million dollars in 2012. The trend is evident everywhere. According to a recent report by Oxfam, the richest eighty-five people in the world—the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Carlos Slim—own more wealth than the roughly 3.5 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.
Eventually, Piketty says, we could see the reëmergence of a world familiar to nineteenth-century Europeans; he cites the novels of Austen and Balzac. In this “patrimonial society,” a small group of wealthy rentiers lives lavishly on the fruits of its inherited wealth, and the rest struggle to keep up. For the United States, in particular, this would be a cruel and ironic fate. “The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivion,” Piketty writes, “and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century’s globalized economy.”
What are the “forces of divergence” that produce enormous riches for some and leave the majority scrabbling to make a decent living？ Piketty is clear that there are different factors behind stagnation in the middle and riches at the top. But, during periods of modest economic growth, such as the one that many advanced economies have experienced in recent decades, income tends to shift from labor to capital. Because of enmeshed economic, social, and political pressures, Piketty fears “levels of inequality never before seen.”
To back up his arguments, he provides a trove of data. He and Saez pioneered the construction of simple charts showing the shares of over-all income received by the richest ten per cent, the richest one per cent, and, even, the richest 0.1 per cent. When the data are presented in this way, Piketty notes, it is easy for people to “grasp their position in the contemporary hierarchy (always a useful exercise, particularly when one belongs to the upper centiles of the distribution and tends to forget it, as is often the case with economists).” Anybody who reads the newspaper will be aware that, in the United States, the “one per cent” is taking an ever-larger slice of the economic pie. But did you know that the share of the top income percentile is bigger than it was in South Africa in the nineteen-sixties and about the same as it is in Colombia, another deeply divided society, today？ In terms of income generated by work, the level of inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world,” Piketty writes.
ome people claim that the takeoff at the very top reflects the emergence of a new class of “superstars”—entrepreneurs, entertainers, sports stars, authors, and the like—who have exploited new technologies, such as the Internet, to enlarge their earnings at the expense of others in their field. If this is true, high rates of inequality may reflect a harsh and unalterable reality: outsized spoils are going to go to Roger Federer, James Patterson, and the WhatsApp guys. Piketty rejects this account. The main factor, he insists, is that major companies are giving their top executives outlandish pay packages. His research shows that “supermanagers,” rather than “superstars,” account for up to seventy per cent of the top 0.1 per cent of the income distribution. (In 2010, you needed to earn at least $1.5 million to qualify for this élite group.) Rising income inequality is largely a corporate phenomenon.
Defenders of big pay packages like to claim that senior managers earn their vast salaries by boosting their firm’s profits and stock prices. But Piketty points out how hard it is to measure the contribution (the “marginal productivity”) of any one individual in a large corporation. The compensation of top managers is typically set by committees comprising other senior executives who earn comparable amounts. “It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity,” Piketty writes.
Many C.E.O.s receive a lot of stock and stock options. Over time, they and other rich people earn a lot of money from the capital they have accumulated: it comes in the form of dividends, capital gains, interest payments, profits from private businesses, and rents. Income from capital has always played a key role in capitalism. Piketty claims that its role is growing even larger, and that this helps explain why inequality is rising so fast. Indeed, he argues that modern capitalism has an internal law of motion that leads, not inexorably but generally, toward less equal outcomes. The law is simple. When the rate of return on capital—the annual income it generates divided by its market value—is higher than the economy’s growth rate, capital income will tend to rise faster than wages and salaries, which rarely grow faster than G.D.P.
If ownership of capital were distributed equally, this wouldn’t matter much. We’d all share in the rise in profits and dividends and rents. But in the United States in 2010, for example, the richest ten per cent of households owned seventy per cent of all the country’s wealth (a good surrogate for “capital”), and the top one per cent of households owned thirty-five per cent of the wealth. By contrast, the bottom half of households owned just five per cent. When income generated by capital grows rapidly, the richest families benefit disproportionately. Since 2009, corporate profits, dividend payouts, and the stock market have all risen sharply, but wages have barely budged. As a result, according to calculations by Piketty and Saez, almost all of the income growth in the economy between 2010 and 2012—ninety-five per cent of it—accrued to the one per cent.
That’s a pretty shocking figure. Piketty calls the tendency for inequality to rise during periods when the rate of return on capital is higher than the economy’s rate of growth “the central contradiction of capitalism.” Of course, the logic can also run in reverse. If the rate of growth exceeds the rate of return, wages and salaries will grow more rapidly than income from capital, and inequality will fall. That’s what happened in much of the twentieth century. The problem, Piketty argues, is that this state of affairs is unlikely to be maintained. “A concatenation of circumstances . . . created a historically unprecedented situation, which lasted for nearly a century,” he writes. “All signs are, however, that it is about to end.”
How convincing is all this？ The standard account of economic development—often attributed to Simon Kuznets, a Harvard economist who popularized it during the nineteen-fifties—has inequality rising during the early stages of industrialization but then falling steadily as incomes converge and over-all living standards rise. Piketty is certainly right to emphasize that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the income compression that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. It was the product of global conflict and domestic political struggles. In Europe, two World Wars and the progressive tax policies that were needed to finance them did enormous damage to the old estates and great fortunes: many rich people, after paying their income and inheritance taxes, didn’t have enough money left to replenish their capital. During the postwar era, inflation ate away at their savings. Meanwhile, labor-friendly laws enabled workers to bargain for higher wages, which raised the proportion of income that labor received. And the task of rebuilding after the wartime destruction made for the rapid expansion of G.D.P. This helped to keep the growth rate above the rate of return on capital, fending off the forces of divergence.
In the United States, the story was less dramatic but broadly similar. The Great Depression wiped out a lot of dynastic wealth, and it also led to a policy revolution. During the nineteen-thirties and forties, Piketty reminds us, Roosevelt raised the top rate of income tax to more than ninety per cent and the tax on large estates to more than seventy per cent. The federal government set minimum wages in many industries, and it encouraged the growth of trade unions. In the decades after the war, it spent heavily on infrastructure, such as interstate highways, which boosted G.D.P. growth. Fearful of spurring public outrage, firms kept the pay of their senior executives in check. Inequality started to rise again only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan led a conservative counter-revolution that slashed tax rates on the rich, decimated the unions, and sought to restrain the growth of government expenditures. Politics and income distribution are two sides of the same coin.
iketty takes some well-aimed shots at economists who seek to obfuscate this reality. “In studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is possible to think that the evolution of prices and wages, or incomes and wealth, obeys an autonomous economic logic having little or nothing to do with the logic of politics or culture,” he writes. “When one studies the twentieth century, however, such an illusion falls apart immediately. A quick glance at the curves describing income and wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together.”
That’s more than mere rhetoric. By insisting that economic laws always take shape through social norms, values, and political choices, Piketty would rescue his discipline from the aridity of abstraction and return it to the richer model of political economy that its best nineteenth-century practitioners pursued. Certainly, it’s hard not to be impressed by his history and his methodological assault on theorists who believe that economics can be reduced to a pure science. But is his futurology too pessimistic？ The Kuznets curve, mapping inequality over time, is a bell curve: inequality peaks and then declines. Piketty would replace it with a U curve. Are we really condemned to return to the social structure of “Mansfield Park” and “Le Père Goriot”？
A more upbeat possibility is that the rate of G.D.P. growth will approach, or even exceed, the rate of return on capital. If it does, the coming decades could look more like the middle of the twentieth century than like the nineteenth century. To be sure, the past half decade, with many advanced countries mired in slumps, doesn’t augur well for an extended period of higher growth. But recessions are cyclical. Over the long term, innovation and increasing productivity are what drive growth. With the rise of the Internet, biotechnology, robots, and other scientific advances, it is at least conceivable that productivity growth will shift to a permanently higher rate, and that G.D.P. will rise with it.
A second possible escape route is for the return on capital to fall, closing the gap with the growth rate. That’s what traditional economic theory would predict. As the stock of physical and financial capital gets bigger, the principle of diminishing returns suggests that the rate of profit and interest should decline. Adam Smith and other classical economists said that this would happen; Marx referred to it as “the most important law of political economy.” Some economists believe that it is already taking place. For the past decade or so, long-term interest rates have been unusually low, leading Ben Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, to bemoan a “global saving glut.” A future of slow growth and ultra-low interest rates wouldn’t be a particularly dynamic place, but it wouldn’t necessarily involve further increases in inequality.
Another thing that Piketty doesn’t adequately consider is the possibility that inequality, in some of its dimensions, is not rising at all. His book largely focusses on Europe and the United States. At the global level, substantial progress has been made in dragging people out of destitution, and extending their lives. In 1981, according to figures from the World Bank, about two in five members of humanity were forced to subsist on roughly a dollar a day. Today, the figure is down to about one in seven. In the early nineteen-fifties, the average life expectancy in developing countries was forty-two years. By 2010, it had risen to sixty-eight years. “Life is better now than at almost any time in history,” Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist, wrote in his 2013 book, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.” “More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty. Lives are longer and parents no longer routinely watch a quarter of their children die.”
That’s great news, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making gains on income inequality. Deaton himself points out that, for all the progress that has been made in poverty reduction and health, the gap between rich and poor countries remains cavernous. “In spite of the achievements of the fast growers, there has been little or no narrowing of income inequality between countries,” he wrote. “For every country with a catch-up story there has been a country with a left-behind story.”
till, some people would argue that wage stagnation and rising inequality in the developed world are an acceptable price to pay for the benefits experienced by the worst off. Piketty doesn’t really address this question. He glosses over China’s success, during the past three decades, in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. He spends more time detailing the fact that, during that interval, income inequality has been sharply rising in China, and in other developing countries, too. Yet the global picture may complicate his own account of inequality in the developed West. He doesn’t seriously consider the argument that globalization—and the rise of nations like China and India—is at once holding down wages and pushing up the profitability of capital, boosting inequality at both ends.
Given that inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, Piketty aptly has a worldwide solution for it: a global tax on wealth combined with higher rates of tax on the largest incomes. How much higher？ Referring to work that he has done with Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva, of M.I.T., Piketty reports, “According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above eighty per cent.” Such a rate applied to incomes greater than five hundred thousand or a million dollars a year “not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.”
iketty is referring here to the occasionally destructive activities of Wall Street traders and investment bankers. His new wealth tax would be like an annual property tax, but it would apply to all forms of wealth. Households would be obliged to declare their net worth to the tax authorities, and they would be taxed upon it. Piketty tentatively suggests a levy of one per cent for households with a net worth of between one million and five million dollars; and two per cent for those worth more than five million. “Or one might prefer a much more steeply progressive tax on large fortunes (for example a rate of 5 to 10 percent on assets above one billion euros),” he adds. A wealth tax would force individuals who often manage to avoid other taxes to pay their fair share; and it would generate information about the distribution of wealth, which is currently opaque. “Some people think that the world’s billionaires have so much money that it would be enough to tax them at a low rate to solve all the world’s problems,” Piketty notes. “Others believe that there are so few billionaires that nothing much would come of taxing them more heavily. . . . In any case, truly democratic debate cannot proceed without reliable statistics.”
Economists can debate whether such a wealth tax would reduce incentives to invest and innovate, or whether it would be punitive enough to make a real dent in inequality. A more immediate problem is that it isn’t going to happen: the nations of the world can’t agree on taxing harmful carbon emissions, let alone taxing the capital of their richest and most powerful citizens. Piketty concedes as much. Still, he says, his proposal provides a standard against which to judge other proposals; it points to the need for other useful reforms, such as improving international banking transparency; and it could be introduced in stages. A good place to begin, he thinks, would be a European wealth tax that would replace the property tax, which “in most countries is tantamount to a wealth tax on the propertied middle class.” But that may be utopian, too. If the European Union moved ahead with Piketty’s proposal, it would produce a rush to tax havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg. Previous efforts to introduce wealth taxes at the national level have run into problems. Spain, for example, adopted a wealth tax in 2012 and abolished it at the start of this year. In Italy, a wealth tax proposed in 2011 never went through. Such difficulties explain why governments still rely on other, admittedly imperfect, tools to tax capital, such as taxes on property, estates, and capital gains.
In the United States, the very idea of a new wealth tax looks like a nonstarter politically, as would the notion of raising the top rate of income tax to eighty per cent. That’s not a knock on Piketty, though. The proper role of public intellectuals is to question accepted dogmas, conceive of new methods of analysis, and expand the terms of public debate. “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” does all these things. As with any such grand prognostication, some of it may not withstand the test of time. But Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/03/31/140331crbo_books_cassidy？currentPage=all
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(六)：结论不重要，过程推理很有收获……
Capital in the Twenty-first century:
我也不清楚究竟花了多少时间才看完的，历时太久，总结起来难免有疏忽，尽量能写点算点吧。
总的来说，思路是这样的，从大规模的历史数据总结下来，经济发展的速度是十分有限的，平均下来也就是1-1.5%(GDP增长），个别非常快的增长，比如5%以上，基本都是发生在catching up effect，也就是相对落后一点的国家在利用发达国家的生产技术和经验下，产生的高速增长，而这种增长受限于差距，并会逐步恢复到正常速度。经济增长速度视作g（growth rate）。根据拥有财富的程度，主要可以把人群分成两组，renter和rentier，renter就是一般人，主要的收入来源于工资，生活水平增长速度与国家整体经济增长速度一致，g，rentier是非常富裕的一类（基本上要到前1%甚至更高，以当代社会看来），这一类人的资本收益远远大于工资收益（可能叫工资收益不大合适，不知道怎么翻译好，就是所谓earned income），他们的主要收入来自于资本收益，r（rate of return on capital）。同样，从历史数据总结看来，平均的资本收益r大概在5-6%，远远大于经济增长g，也就是r>g，在这种情况下就会必然造成两类人群的收入增长速度差距，rentier每年的收益取出一小部分（不到1%）来消费，剩下的仍然会远大于一般人，从而逐步扩大贫富差距。因为经济增长速度不会出现大幅度提高，所以这种现象就会一直持续，而且因为初始资金大小的不同（initial capital），资金越多，可选择的投资方式越多，收益高的可能性越高，就进一步的扩大的最富有的人与其他人的差距。
对于这种情况，作者的观点是，全球范围内共享金融机构信息，主要就是个人的资产信息，然后依照资产进行收税，但不是特别高的，以免影响企业家继续发展。
几个比较关键的数据，一般发达国家的情况，是前10%的人持有超过50%的资产，而这其中最前的1%或者说0.5%，大概占有20-30%的资产，这中间的梯度极其大。下面50%的人，几乎是没有任何资产的，或者是负资产。
几个零星的地方，想到什么记什么了：
Tax competition：如果不能全球统一对资产征税的话，必然面临的结果就是tax competition，也就是税率差导致富人向低税的地方移动，最终还是会继续拉低税率。
能购买国债（借钱给国家）的多半是rentier，富人居多，而目前很多国家支付的利息比用于教育的投资都多（相对于GDP的比例）
关于Cyprus:
之前一直没有怎么关注过Cyprus，这次在Capital一书最后面的部分刚好有一章粗略的讨论了一下，挺有意思，趁着印象比较清楚，先抓紧记录一下。
起源略去不论，到危机爆发的时候主要是因为Cyprus的银行拥有大量的境外资产，而其中大部分来自于俄罗斯，根据有关资料，虽然不详细，但是表明其中很重要的部分是一些非常大的个人账户，极有可能是资金十分巨大的俄罗斯寡头。而银行管理这些资产的时候，很大部分都用于投资了希腊的债务和房地产（房地产后来在危机的时候也大规模贬值了。）
当希腊债务危机出现的时候，采取“haircut”（打折偿还债务）的方式，导致持有大量希腊债券的Cyprus银行也出现钱荒，作为欧盟成员，当然要接受援助，对此，Troika（a "Troika" consisting of the European Commission, the ECB, the IMF）提出的策略是对存款征税，分成几个不同的级别，某种程度上这倒是符合了作者主张的Capital tax，但是这种方式太过于局限，因为只针对存款征税，只需要把存款转移为股票或者基金之类的，就可以避开。而且对于一般的Cyprus居民与俄罗斯寡头们也没有任何区分。
这个过程显示出了央行和金融机构的局限，优势是他们可以非常快的行动，但是缺陷就是没有办法明确的针对性重新分配资产。当然，作者借此机会又重申了一下他的另一个主张，全球银行的资料应该共享，因为个征税的解决方案没有针对性地原因之一也是因为银行账户的信息不明。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(七)：在文学中荡涤资本的残酷
前前后后大约拖了一个月左右,总算是把这本书啃完了,并且还写了长长的读书笔记。也许在网上对这本书的评价并不是特别的高,但就我个⼈⽽言,我给满分。最主要的是作者给出了非常清晰的数据分析以及强有力的论述,还与文学融化在了一起。作者在序言中就指出现在很多的经济学家都无法静下心来做数据, 的确纵观本书,数据量之大令人叹为观止,单凭这点,这本书就很有阅读的意义。
其次就是关于资本不平等的论述,作者主要指出当r > g 的时候,资本的不平等就会加剧,而尤其是在现在这个经济发展缓慢,过去的资本将占有越来越重要的地位,从而富与穷得差距也会变大。尤其是当我看 到美国的前1%的人大约占有国民生产总值大约20%的时候,你就知道8/2原则也太过包容了。这个社会终将变成食利者的社会,而那些除了出卖劳动⼒一无所有的人,只能被占有。除了知识,也许找不到第二条路让自⼰己摆脱贫困了吧,而在这个社会即使知识再超群也会有无奈之处。
然后我想⼤大赞美作者将⽂文学融入到了书中,形象⽣生动的描绘了资本在19,20 世纪的重要性。读来栩栩如生,回味无穷,这也是我第一次觉的,看的小说原来还是有用的,最喜欢其中关于巴尔扎克的《高老头》 的一段论述,非常深刻。其实纵观当时的文学,令我印象最深刻的便是毛姆的《⼈人性的枷锁》,其中有一 段很想拿来分享:“他不懂得在人生的旅途上,非得越过一大片⼲干旱贫瘠、地形险恶的荒野,才能跨入活⽣生的现实世界。 所谓“青春多幸福”的说法,不过是一种幻觉,是青春已逝的⼈人们的一种幻觉;而年轻人知道自己是不幸的,因为他们充满了不切实际的幻想,全是从外部灌输到他们头脑里去的,每当他们同实 际接触时,他们总是碰得头破⾎血流。 看来,他们似乎成了一场共谋的牺牲品,因为他们所读过的书籍 (由于经过必然的淘汰,留存下来的都是尽善尽美的),还有长辈之间的交谈(他们透过健忘的玫瑰色的烟雾来回首往事的),都为他们开拓了一个虚假的生活前景。 年轻人得靠自己去发现:过去念到过的话, 全是谎言,谎言,谎言;而且每一次的发现,又无疑是往那具已被钉在⽣活十字架上的身躯再打入一颗钉子。不可思议的是,大凡每个经历过痛苦幻灭的⼈人,由于受到内心那股抑制不住的强劲力量的驱使,又总是有意无意地再给现实⽣生活添上一层虚幻的色彩。”我只想一遍又一遍的感受这段话中的精髓,在这个资本主义的社会,我们应该如何⽣生存,值得深思。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(八)：21世纪的乌托邦空想
《21世纪资本论》书评： 21世纪的乌托邦空想
原文译者 samycai
《二十一世纪资本论》 托马斯·匹克迪著
法国经济学家托马斯·匹克迪（Thomas Piketty）偏爱资本主义，因为它能有效地分配资源。但他并不欣赏资本主义下的工资分配方式。他认为，几乎任何财富累积都是违反道德的。要彻底铲除经济中的这种不平等现象事关公正。要实现公正，就要消除高薪，并通过向富人征税减少其现有财富。
匹克迪先生在《二十一世纪资本论》中，对过去300年来的工资财富做了详尽探究，并列出有关多国的大量收入分配数据，旨在证明近几十年来，不平等现象已经扩大，很快会变得更加严重。不论匹克迪的数据是否令人信服，其中还是有令人质疑的余地。因为作者自己也在书中标有注意事项。 且事实上，书中的很多早期数据都是基于房地产遗产税和无把握推断的有限样本，但这些基本无关紧要。因为本书不能算是一本经济分析著作，而是一篇观点奇异的长篇意识形态文章。
匹克迪是巴黎经济学院的教授。他认为唯有低收入工人的生产力可予以客观衡量。他假定，若一份工作具有重复性，诸如“流水线工人或快餐服务员，”要衡量他们每个人的贡献价值相对容易。因此，这些工人有权享有他们的薪酬。但他认为高收入者的生产力就较难衡量，且他们的工资到头来具有“很大程度上的任意性。”他们所反映出的是一种“意识构想”而非价值。
据匹克迪所言，企业“高管”们飙升的薪酬已经成为日益严重的不公现象之来源。而这些高管只能通过运气或企业管理中的缺陷获得好处。只需偶尔扫一眼报纸便可知这种情况确实存在。但是作者认为没有哪个首席执行官的工作表现配得上他的收入。到底哪种职业有权获得高薪，——是运动员还是内科医生？又或是以21.99美元一副本的价格售卖零边际成本电子书的经济学家？作者并没有说明这点，因为他不想“沉溺于构建一个财富的道德等级制。”
他确实承认企业家们对促进经济发展而言“必不可少”，但是他们的成功通常存在污点。有些企业家的成功，靠的是“真正的创业努力，”而一些企业家的成功则仅凭运气或“完全的盗窃。”甚至那些通过创业努力得来的财富很快也发展成“极度持久的资本集中。”这是个滚雪球般不断加剧地不公平现象，因为“有时财产始于盗窃，任意的资本收益很容易会在基础犯罪中根深蒂固下来。”纵观全书，几乎全是对金融资本赚取回报这种观念的中世纪仇视。
匹克迪先生认为一个社会越富有，就有越多的人想争取相对最佳的社会地位，不公平现象就会随之而来。在谈到未来图景时，他提到简·奥斯丁和巴尔扎克这些永恒的经济权威人士。纵观全文，他一直反复提到一个题外话，那就是《理智与情感》和《高老头》里为追求嫁妆使用阴谋诡计的的小说人物。他对下面这个演算很着迷：辛勤工作所得到的报酬是否比那些通过与富豪结婚而获得的财产更多？如果不是，“为什么我们还要工作？究竟为什么要遵守道德？”
虽说美国企业高官是匹克迪特别讨厌的一群人，成千上万的劳动人民也同样深深地困扰着他。他蔑视地称这群人为“微不足道的食利者” ——这些人微薄的收入让其对着那1%的富人望洋兴叹，但同时这群人又有些积蓄，退休金和其他资产。这一大群人将会变得愈加壮大，愈加富有，通过遗产把资产传给下一代，而这是“一种很常见且令人不安的不公平的形态。”他悲叹说这种现象很难“矫正”，因为它涉及的人数太多，不像易被妖魔化的小部分精英。
因此下一步该做什么？匹克迪先生敦促先向收入在50万至100万美元的人群征收80%的所得税。这不是在为教育或失业福利筹集资金。恰恰相反，他不希望这项征税带来很多国家收入，因为收税的目的在于“终结这种收入。” 同时，向收入低至20万美元的人群征收50%—60%的税率来发展“贫穷的美国社会状况”也很必要。另外，还必须向富人征收高达10%的年财富税，向一般富裕人群征收高达20%的一次性资产评估税。他带着轻松的口吻告诉我们这些征税都不会拉低国家经济增长，降低生产力，企业家热情或是创新动力。
促进增长并不是匹克迪所关注的，他没把它视为经济事件，也不认为它能解决更广阔的分配公平问题。他认为经济是静态的零和游戏；如果一个群体的收入增加，另一个群体就会不可避免地变穷。他把结果的平等性视为最终目的和唯一原因。而以下备选却很少提及—例如，最大化社会总体财富，或是增强经济自由，亦或是寻找最有可能的机会平等，又或按约翰· 罗尔斯（John Rawls）的观点，保证最贫困人群的福利得到最大化。
毫无疑问，贫困，失业和机会不平等是资本主义社会面临的主要挑战。运气好坏，努力工作，懒惰优点是人类事物的固有特征。匹克迪不是第一个乌托邦式的空想家。他援引的话，诸如，“苏维埃实践”让人们“摆脱枷锁，卸下累积财富的桎梏。”依他所言，这只会导致人类灾难，因为社会需要市场和私有财产拥有一个运转的经济。匹克迪称其解决方法提供了一个“更平和有效的方式来应对私有资本及其收益的外部问题。”这位教授该读的不是奥斯丁和巴尔扎尔的作品，而该读读乔治欧·威尔的《动物庄园》和阿瑟·库勒斯的《中午的黑暗》。
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(九)：Justice or efficiency, that is a question
In this 21st Century Capital, Piketty raises several key observations based on his study of the past 100 to 200 years of economic history. The observations are quite straightforward but the way he demonstrates them is extremely convincing, thanks to the enormous data; the solution he proposed is quite ideal, but might take quite a long time to realize.
The key observations are:
1. In the long run, the global GDP growth rate will return to its norm, which ranges from 1 to 1.5 percent according to the optimistic scenario. The growth rate is far below this estimates in periods before 18th century, the high growth rate in 20th century is only an exceptional one due to the catch up effect of emerging markets;
2. However, the return on capital is historically at around 5 to 6 percent, and the forecast return of capital in the 21st century will remain at about 4 to 5 percent. This is below the historical level given the abundant capital accumulated but still much higher than the global GDP growth rate;
3. Given above two factors, it seems inevitable that the wealth concentration as well as the inequality will increase in the coming years, which might be the most challenging issue for a stable society;
4. To tackle this issue, what Piketty proposed is a global tax on capital, which should be progressive in nature. Tax on capital other than income, is the only for avoidance of extreme wealth inequality;
5. A big difficulty for a global tax on capital is that the richest people might arrange tax evasion through portfolio management in certain tax havens. This requires international cooperation and a global sharing of banking information among different nations/states.
There should be no argument over his first 3 points and they are kind of common sense. The key is, however, what is the best way to address it, in order to balance justice and efficiency, and to harmonize human ideal and human nature. To certain extent, the ancient China, up to Qing Dynasty, was trapped in the cycle of growth and concentration, uprising, destruction and then rebuilding, of which the first 3 points are actually the fundamental driving forces.
1. It was in this context that the first communist and socialist movements developed. The central argument was simple: 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？ P8
2. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriate products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. P9
3. What is more, he devoted little thought to the question of how a society in which private capital had been totally abolished would be organized politically and economically-a complex issue if ever there was one, as shown by the tragic totalitarian experiments undertaken in states where private capital was abolished. P10
4. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it. P19
5. The data show, however, that the concentration of wealth was as large at that time in France as in Britain, which clearly demonstrates that equality of rights in the marketplace cannot ensure equality of rights tout court. P30
6. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. P32
7. One conclusion stands out in this brief history of national accounting: national accounts are a social construct in perpetual evolution. They always reflect the preoccupations of the era when they were conceived. P58
8. To sum up, historical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill and education, not by becoming the property of the wealthy.
9. The central thesis of this book is precisely that an apparently small gap between the return on capital and the rate of growth can in the long run have powerful and destabilizing effects on the structure and dynamics of social inequality. P77
10. One should be wary, however, of the conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvellous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes. There is some truth in this view, but since the early nineteenth century it has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. P85
11. At this stage, I merely want to stress the fact that the loss of stable monetary reference points in twentieth century marks a significant rupture with previous centuries, not only in the realms of economics and politics but also in regard to social, cultural, and literary matters. P108
12. Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts - that is its vocation, its logical destination. P116
13. In other words, the history of the ratio of national capital to national income in France and Britain since the eighteenth century, summarized earlier, has largely been the history of the relation between private capital and national income. P126
14. The mechanism of redistribution via inflation is extremely powerful, and it played a crucial historical role in both Britain and France in the twentieth century. P133
15. This radical reinterpretation of Ricardian equivalence, which was first proposed by the American economist Robert Barro, fails to take account of the fact that the bulk of the public debt is in practice owned by a minority of the population (as in nineteenth-century Britain but not only there), so that the debt is the vehicle of important internal redistribution when it is repaid as well as when it is not. In view of the high degree of concentration that has always been characteristic of the wealth distribution, to study these questions without asking about inequalities between social groups is in fact to say nothing about significant aspects of the subject and what is really at stake. P135
16. This formula, which can be regarded as the second fundamental law of capitalism, reflects an obvious but important point: a country that saves a lot and grows slowly will over the long run accumulate an enormous stock of capital (relative to its income), which can in turn have a significant effect on the social structure and distribution of wealth. P166
17. In all the rich countries, public dissaving and the consequent decrease in public wealth accounted for a significant portion of the increase in private wealth (between one-tenth and one-quarter on the country). This was not the primary reason for the increase in private wealth, but it should not be neglected. P185
18. With these assumptions, the dynamic law B=s/g implies that the global capital/income ratio will quite logically continue to rise and could approach 700 percent before the end of the twenty-first century. P195
19. At this stage, let me note simply that inflation primarily plays a role - sometimes desirable, sometimes not - in redistributing wealth among those who have it. In any case, the potential impact of inflation on the average return on capital is fairly limited and much smaller than the apparent nominal effect. P212
20. It is quite possible that capital's share will increase in coming decades to the level it reached at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This may happen even if the structural form of technology-and the relative importance of capital and labor-does not change (although the relative bargaining power of labor and capital may change) or if technology changes only slightly (which seems to me the more plausible alternative) yet the increase in the capital/income ratio drives capital's share of income toward or perhaps beyond historic peaks because the long-run elasticity of substitution of capital for labor is apparently greater than one. P224
It seems that those statements made by these so-called great economists are only their opinions, or view, which are not necessarily the truth. We should be aware of this point to avoid blind belief in them. P231
21. Progress toward economic and technological rationality need not imply progress toward democratic and meritocratic rationality. The primary reason for this is simple: technology, like the market, has neither limits nor morality. P234
22. The first regularity we observe when we try to measure income inequality in practice is that inequality with respect to capital is always greater than inequality with respect to labor. The distribution of capital ownership (and of income from capital) is always more concentrated than the distribution of income from labor. P244
23. In historical terms, it was a major transformation, which deeply altered the social landscape and the political structure of society and helped to redefine the terms of distributive conflict. It is therefore essential to understand why it occurred. P262
24. Such concentration of capital is in fact a necessary condition for societies based on accumulated and inherited wealth, such as those described in the novels of Austen and Balzac, to exist and proper. Hence one of the main goals of this book is to understand the conditions under which such concentrated wealth can emerge, persist, vanish and perhaps reappear. P262
25. We will not learn any of this by consulting the publications of the international organizations or national statistical agencies who compile these statistics, however, because they usually focus on indices that deliberately ignore the top end of the distribution and give no indication of income or wealth beyond the ninetieth percentile. P268
26. The way one tries to measure inequality is never neutral. P270
27. To sum up: inequality in the United States started from a lower peak on the eve of World War I but at its low point after World War II stood above inequality in Europe. Europe in 1914-1945 witnessed the suicide of rentier society, but nothing of the sort occurred in the United States. P294
28. By comparing various available sources, it is possible to estimate that the upper decile's share slightly exceeded 50 percent of US national income on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008 and then again in the early 2010s. P295
29. This is a crucial point: the facts show quite clearly that the financial crisis as such cannot be counted on to put an end to the structural increase of inequality in the United States. P296
30. That is quite possible, but it is important to be aware of the fact that the United States' internal imbalances are four times larger than its global imbalances. This suggests that the place to look for the solutions of certain problems may be more within the United States than in China or other countries. P298
31. I begin with the English-speaking countries. Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. P315
32. To my mind, the most convincing explanation for the explosion of the very top US incomes is the following. As noted, the vast majority of top earners are senior managers of large firms. It is rather naive to seek an objective basis for their high salaries in individual 'productivity'. P330
33. According to this theory, the reason why the return on capital has been historically stable at 4-5 percent is ultimately psychological: since this rate of return reflects the average person's impatience and attitude toward the future, it cannot vary much from this level. P359
34. Clearly, equality of rights and opportunities is not enough to ensure and egalitarian distribution of wealth. P364
35. What structural changes occurred between 1914 and 1945, and more generally during the twentieth century, that are preventing the concentration of wealth from regaining its previous heights, even though private wealth overall is prospering almost as handsomely today as in the past？ The most natural and important explanation is that governments in the twentieth century began taxing capital and its income at significant rates. P373
36. Sometimes this went along with a certain justification of extreme inequality of wealth, in the sense that one can read between the lines an argument that without such inequality it would have been impossible for a very small elite to concern themselves with something other than subsistence: extreme inequality is almost a condition of civilization. P415
37. Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom. P416
38. No matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility. P443
39. To sum up: the main effect of inflation is not to reduce the average return on capital but to redistribute it. And even though the effects of inflation are complex and multidimensional, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the redistribution induced by inflation is mainly to the detriment of the least wealthy and to the benefit of the wealthiest, hence in the opposite direction from what is generally desired. P455
40. The conclusion is obvious: the net asset position of the rich countries relative to the rest of the world is in fact positive (the rich countries own on average more than the poor countries and nor vice visa, which ultimately is not very surprising), but this is masked by the fact that the wealthiest residents of the rich countries are hiding some of their assets in tax havens. P467
41. Article I of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) also proclaims that 'men are born free and remain free and equal in rights'. This is followed immediately, however, by the statement that 'social distinctions can be based only on common utility'. P479
42. The US and France Revolutions both affirmed equality of rights as an absolute principle-a progressive stance at that time. But in practice, during the nineteenth century, the political systems that grew out of those revolutions concentrated mainly on the protection of property rights. P481
43. The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. P485
44. One often hears that 'a public pension is the patrimony of those without patrimony'. This is true, but it does not mean that it would not be wise to encourage people of more modest means to accumulate nest eggs of their own. P490
45. This illustrates a more general phenomenon: the tendency of the rich countries to use the less developed world as a field of experimentation, without really seeking to capitalize on the lessons of their own historical experience. P492
46. If taxation at the top of the society hierarchy were to become more regressive in the future, the impact on the dynamics of wealth inequality would likely be significant, leading to a very high concentration of capital. P496
47. Has the US political process been captured by the 1 percent？ This idea has become increasingly popular among observers of the Washington political scene. P513
48. Without a radical shock, it seems fairly likely that the current equilibrium will persist for quite some time. The egalitarian pioneer ideal has faded into oblivions, and the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century's globalized economy. P514
49. According to this logic, the purpose of the tax on capital is thus to force people who use their wealth inefficiently to sell assets in order to pay their taxes, thus ensuring that those assets wind up in the hands of more dynamic investors. P526
50. Once again, financial transparency and a progressive global tax on capital are the right answers. P539
51. From this analysis, Friedman drew a clear political conclusion: in order to ensure regular, undisrupted growth in a capitalist economy, it is necessary and sufficient to make sure that monetary policy is designed to ensure steady growth of the money supply. P549
52. To be sure, net public wealth is virtually zero, given the size of the public debt, but net private wealth is so high that the sum of the two is as great as it has been in a century. Hence the idea that we are about to bequeath a shameful burden of debt to our children and grandchildren and that we ought to wear sackcloth and ashes and beg for forgiveness simply makes no sense. The nations of Europe have never been so rich. What is true and shameful, on the other hand, is that this vast national wealth is very unequally distributed. P567
53. This is a very important debate for the decades ahead. The public debt (which is much smaller than total private wealth and perhaps not really that difficult to eliminate) is not our major worry. The more urgent need is to increase our educational capital and prevent the degradation of our natural capital. P568
54. The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based. P571
55. The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. P572
《Capital in the Twenty-First Century》读后感(十)：与亚当·斯密和卡尔·马克思较量
42岁的皮克提的新书《二十一世纪资本论》（Capital in the Twenty-First Century，哈佛大学出版社）一鸣惊人，至少在经济学界是这样的。他的书抨击了人们之前对高级资本主义的仁慈的假设，预测在工业化国家财富会越来越不平等，这将对公正和公平的民主价值观产生深刻而恶劣的影响。
曾任世界银行经济学家的布兰科·米兰诺维奇(Branko Milanovic)称它是“经济思想史上具有分水岭意义的著作之一”。诺贝尔经济学奖获得者、《纽约时报》专栏作家保罗·克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)写道，它“将是本年——也许是这十年——最重要的经济学著作”。值得注意的是，这样一本主题严肃的图书已经进入《纽约时报》畅销书榜单。
《二十一世纪资本论》的书名是为了与马克思的《资本论》(Das Kapital)相呼应。该书意在回归马克思和亚当·斯密(Adam Smith)等前辈写过的经济史和政治经济学范畴。它尽力去理解西方社会以及支撑它的经济规律。在这个过程中，皮克提抨击了“财富推动一切发展”的观点，向民主政府解决不断扩大的贫富差距发起了挑战——教皇弗朗西斯(Pope Francis)和奥巴马总统最近也都对不公平所带来的后果发出警告。
皮克提在一个政治家庭中长大，他的左翼父母曾参加1968年打倒传统法国的示威游行。后来他们前往法国南端的奥德(Aude)省养山羊。父母不是他想谈论的话题。他说，更相关、更重要的是他这一代人“现成的经验”：共产主义的崩溃、东欧的经济衰退，以及1991年的第一次海湾战争。
那些事件让他明白：在这个世界上，经济观念能产生如此糟糕的结果。海湾战争向他展示出，“如果政府愿意，它们能在财富再分配方面做很多事情”。皮克提说，快速军事干预迫使萨达姆·侯赛因(Saddam Hussein)放弃科威特和它的石油，这体现了共同政治意愿的非凡力量。“如果我们能在几个月内派100万大军到科威特索回石油，那我们应该也能就避税港做一些事情。”
他是想派军队到英吉利海峡人口稀少的避税天堂格恩西岛吗？声音柔和的皮克提几乎大笑起来。“我们甚至不必那么做——一些简单的基本贸易政策和贸易制裁就能立刻解决问题，”他说。
皮克提是个优等生，通过传统方式成为法国精英人士，18岁时被精英云集的巴黎高等师范学校录取。22岁时完成关于财富再分配理论的博士论文，该论文获得了一些奖项。然后他到麻省理工教经济学，两年后由于对美国的经济学研究感到失望而返回法国。
“我的博士论文主要是关于纯粹的经济理论的，因为那是最容易做的事。我在马萨诸塞理工学院做助理教授时也是研究经济理论，”他说，“那时我很年轻，在那方面做得也很成功，所以那是个轻松的工作。但是我很快意识到那里没有人认真收集关于收入和财富的历史数据，所以我开始做这件事。”
他说，理论经济学过于关注保证计量经济学和统计插值技术正确，“你没有真的在思考，你不敢问那些重大的问题”。美国经济学家们也往往把自己研究的问题缩小到自己能回答的范围内，“但有时这些问题不是很有趣，”他说。“我想写一本真正的、能与每个人对话的书，这意味着我不能选择自己的问题。我必须正面应对那些重要的问题，不能逃避”。
他厌恶经济学领域的狭隘。所以他决定写一本巨著，一本在他看来既是关于经济学也是关于历史的书，一本能够手把手引领普通读者的书。
他也不畏惧文学，从简·奥斯汀(Jane Austen)和巴尔扎克(Balzac)等现实主义小说家对社会的描述中寻找灵感。在这些小说中，财富最好是通过聪明的婚姻获得的；每个人都知道继承土地和财产是过上好生活的唯一方式，因为光靠劳动是挣不到钱的。他想知道那种臆断后来发生了怎样的变化。
皮克提的著作既是对马克思主义的挑战，也是对自由经济学的挑战。根据几个世纪的数据，他发现，资本收入的增长率比经济增长率高好几倍，这意味着工资收入的比例在相对缩小。
皮克提的著作既是对马克思主义的挑战，也是对自由经济学的挑战。根据几个世纪的数据，他发现，资本收入的增长率比经济增长率高好几倍，这意味着工资收入的比例在相对缩小。
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
通过与加州大学伯克利分校的经济学教授伊曼纽尔·塞斯(Emmanuel Saez)合作，皮克提把自己的研究从法国延伸到了美国，他发现20世纪初的规律——“资源分配的头10%几乎完全是租赁收入、股利收入和利息收入”——似乎在20世纪70年代至90年代初变得不那么普遍了。
“我过了很长时间才意识到实际上我们在慢慢朝之前均衡的方向发展，我们是一个漫长的渐变的过程的一部分，”他说。他在20世纪90年代末开始研究这个问题时，“它不可能被如此清晰地理解——又多出20年的数据对我们理解战后这段时期帮助极大。”
他的发现——在现代化的电脑帮助下——是以先进工业国家几个世纪的财富积累和经济增长数据为基础的。这些观点说起来也相当简单：资本收入的增长率比经济增长率高好几倍，这意味着工资收入的比例相对在缩小，工资收入的增长极少能快于总体经济的增长。在人口和经济增长放慢时，这种不平等变得极为突出。
战后经济看起来不一样了，那种不平等降低了，原因是历史灾难。“一战”、经济大萧条和“二战”摧毁了私人资本的大量积累，特别是在欧洲。法国人所说的“辉煌的三十年”——战后大约30年的快速经济增长和不断减少的不公平——是个反弹。当然，美国的变化不是那么明显，因为战争是在别的地方进行的。
人口和经济增长率高于正常水平，加上对富人增税，减少了不平等。但是20世纪五六十年代的专业和政治假设——不平等将会稳定下来并自行减少——被证明是错误的。我们现在回到了传统模式，每年的资本收益率是4%至5%，而经济增长率大约是1.5%。
所以不平等很快开始加速，某种程度上里根(Reagan)和撒切尔(Thatcher)对富人减税的政策加剧了这种状况。“涓滴经济学本来可以是正确的，”皮克提简单地说，“只不过它碰巧错了。”
他的作品既是对马克思主义的挑战，也是对放任经济学的挑战，这两种理论“都指望依靠纯粹的经济力量来实现普遍的和谐或公正”，他说。马克思认为由于体制的矛盾，资本收益率将降低至接近零，带来崩溃和革命，皮克提的看法则完全相反。“资本收益率可能永远高于增长率——这实际上是人类历史上大部分时候的情况，我们有充分的理由相信未来还会是这样。”
2012年，1%收入最高的美国家庭获得了全国收入的22.5%，是自1928年之后的最高值。现在10%最富有的美国人占有全国财富的70%不止，比1913年镀金时代结束时的比例更高。而且其中一半是由最富有的1%的人占有的。
皮克提有三个女儿，分别11岁、13岁和16岁。他不是革命者。他是个无党派人士，他说自己从未为任何政客担任经济顾问。他称自己是个实用主义者，只是凭数据说话。
他承认自己的著作从本质上讲是政治性的，他对现在常见的管理层高薪非常不满，说“花1000万请一个人为你工作的想法，纯属观念形态的问题”。
他说不公平本身是可以接受的，它能激发个人主动性和财富创造，在累进税和其他措施的协助下，它能让社会上的每个人都更富有。“我不介意不公平，只要它是对大众有益的，”他说。
但是和哥伦比亚大学经济学家约瑟夫·E·施蒂格利茨(Joseph E. Stiglitz)一样，他认为极端的不公平“在威胁我们的民主体制”。民主不只是一人一票，而是承诺提供平等机会。
他说，当收入、政治影响力和知识信息产出极端不平等时，“民主体制很难运行。20世纪的一个很大的教训是我们不需要19世纪的不平等继续下去。”但在他看来，这正是资本主义世界再次前进的方向。
跟他合作的塞斯说，“托马既追求完美，又没有耐心——他想让事情做得又好又快。”他补充说，皮克提“对经济学有着难以置信的直觉”。
这本书的最后一部分表达了皮克提的政策理念。他支持对真正的财富（去掉债务）执行全面累进税，产生的收益不是交给效率低下的政府，而是重新分配给那些拥有较少资本的人。“我们只是想要一个公平而实际的分担税务负担的方法，”他说。
他说，与单独的收入相比，净财产更能表明支付能力。“我只是建议减少世界上二分之一或四分之三几乎没有财产的人的财产税，”他说。
该书是一年前以法文出版的，它不是没有遭到批评，特别是针对皮克提的政策处方，有人认为从政治角度讲它太天真。还有人指出，有些资本的增长是因为老龄化人口和战后抚恤金计划，不一定是继承来的。
肯定还会有更多的批评，皮克提说他对此持欢迎的态度。“我当然期待争论。”
本文最初发表于2014年4月20日。