Thomas Piketty during a conference |
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| Born | May 7, 1971 |
| Nationality | France |
| Institution | Paris School of Economics |
| Field | Public economics |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics École normale supérieure |
| Information at IDEAS/RePEc | |
Thomas Piketty (born May 7, 1971) is a French economist who specializes in the study of economic inequality.
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Piketty was born on May 7, 1971, in Clichy, Paris, to parents who had taken part in the May 1968 riots.[1][2] He gained a C-stream Baccalauréat, and after taking mathematics preparatory classes, he entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) at the age of 18, where he studied economics.
At the age of 22, Piketty was awarded his PhD for a thesis on the subject of wealth redistribution, which he had written at the ENS and at the London School of Economics, under the supervision of Roger Guesnerie.
After his thesis, Piketty taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1993 to 1995. In 1995, he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a researcher, and in 2000 he became director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
From late 2006 to early 2007, he was the first head of the Paris School of Economics, after spending three years creating it.[3] He quickly left, however, due to his support for Ségolène Royal in the French presidential campaign (which have compromised his neutrality obligation), and according to him, following a decision he had taken a long time before.[4] Piketty has been back teaching at the Paris School of Economics since 2007.
Picketty specializes in economic inequality, with his works in this domain covering both theoretical and normative issues.[5] At first, in the late 1990s, he took a historic and statistical approach.[6]
A research project into high incomes in France led to the publishing of Les hauts revenus en France au XXe (Grasset, 2001) (High incomes in France in the 20th Century), which was based on survey of statistical series covering the whole of the 20th century, built from data from the fiscal services (particularly income tax declarations).
Piketty's work revealed that earnings inequalities dropped sharply during the 20th century in France, mostly after World War II. This was due, in large part, to a decrease in estate inequalities, while wage inequalities remained stable. According to Piketty, the decrease resulted from the strong growth in the progressivity of income tax after the war, which upset the dynamics of estate accumulation by reducing the surplus money available for saving by the wealthiest.
Piketty opposes the decrease in fiscal burden that has been happening in France since the late 1990s, because he believes it will assist the rebuilding of the earlier large fortunes of the rentier class. Replacing this economically inactive class, which previously dominated the income hierarchy, with working people gaining their income from labor, would lead to a decrease in inequalities and a stimulation of economic growth.
Employing a statistical survey, Piketty also attempted to show that the Laffer effect, which asserts that high marginal taxation rates on top incomes are an incentive for the rich to work less, was probably negligible or small in the case of France.[7]
Piketty subsequently began comparative works on the dynamics of inequalities in other developed countries. He built statistical series based on a similar method to that which he used in his studies of France, working with other economists, particularly Emmanuel Saez. This research led to reports on the evolution of inequalities in the USA,[8] and on economic dynamics in the English-speaking world and the countries of continental Europe.[9]
The surveys found that English-speaking countries, after undergoing a similar decrease in economic inequalities as in continental Europe, have, over the past 30 years, been following a process of building strong inequalities again.
The analyses of Piketty can be seen as a critical continuation of the pioneering work of Simon Kuznets in the 1950s.[10] According to Kuznets, the evolution of earnings inequalities was to be shaped, in the long run, as a bell curve (Kuznets Curve), growing at the beginning of the industrial revolution, to decrease later, due particularly to the reallocation of labor force from low productivity sectors like agriculture to higher productivity sectors such as industry.
According to Piketty, the tendency observed by Kuznets in the early 1950s is not necessarily a product of deep economical forces (e.g. sectoral spillover, the effects of technological progress). Instead, estates, rather than wage inequalities, decreased, and they did for reasons which are not specifically economical (among which the creation of income tax plays a major role), contingent or reversible. Consequently, nothing guarantees that this decrease will continue. In fact, inequalities have grown sharply in the USA over the last 30 years, returning to their 1930s level.
Besides these surveys, which make up the core of his work, Piketty has published in other areas, often with a connection to economic inequalities.
He took an interest in inequalities in schools, in which he sees a major cause for the persistence of inequalities in wages, and therefore in the economy, and he surveyed the impact of class sizes on success at school.[11]
He has published a short book about the future of the French pension system, in which he promotes the implementation of a Swedish-inspired points-based system.[12]
Piketty has close connections with the French socialist party, and took part in the economic commission of that party from 1995 to 1997.
During the 2007 French presidential campaign, he supported Ségolène Royal, and was one of her economic advisors.[13]
According to a list dated November 11, 2003, he is a member of the scientific orientation board of the association À gauche en Europe, founded by Michel Rocard and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Piketty is a columnist for Libération, and occasionally writes op-eds for Le Monde.