French economist who argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r > g drives growing wealth inequality
Born in Clichy near Paris, Piketty studied mathematics and economics at the École Normale Supérieure and received his PhD at 22 for a thesis on wealth redistribution. After teaching at MIT he joined the CNRS in 1995, became a professor at EHESS in 2000 and was the first head of the Paris School of Economics in 2006. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) he argued that the rate of return on capital in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, so that wealth inequality will increase. Capital and Ideology followed in 2019. In 2007 he was an economic adviser to the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.
Activities and affiliations
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1995–
France state institutionsCNRS researcher, EHESS professorMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1995Researcher at the CNRS
- 2000Professor at EHESS
- 2006First head of the Paris School of Economics
- 2013Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- 2019Capital and Ideology