Thomas Piketty
French economist and professor
Thomas Piketty is a French economist who studies wealth and income inequality. He wrote the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
2 summaries 18 min of listening
French Born 1971 in Clichy, France
About Thomas Piketty
Piketty was born in 1971 in Clichy, near Paris, and studied mathematics and economics at the École Normale Supérieure. He completed his doctorate at 22, then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 1995. He teaches at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics. In 2006 he became the first head of that school, after taking part in its creation. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, draws on 250 years of data about wealth concentration and distribution. It argues that returns on capital in developed countries have persistently outpaced economic growth. Piketty expects this to widen inequality, and he proposes a progressive global tax on wealth. Capital and Ideology, published in 2019, looks at income inequality in various societies across history.