Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔma pikɛti]; born May 7, 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is the director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and professor at the Paris School of Economics.
He is the author of the bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasizes the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a global tax on wealth.
Books (In English) in order of publication:
Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between European and English-Speaking Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2007
Top Incomes: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2010
Capital in the Twenty-First Century – 2014
About Capital in the Twenty-First Century (AER, 2015)
Carbon and Inequality: from Kyoto to Paris (L. Chancel, T. Piketty, PSE, 2015)
Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times (Viking, 2016)
Why Save the Bankers? And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901–1998 (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020)
A Brief History of Equality, Harvard University Press, 2022.
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