I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.
Interpretation
The unpredictability of economic trends makes it difficult to confidently predict wealth and taxation outcomes.
In this quote, Thomas Piketty highlights the historical unpredictability of income, wealth, and taxation. He suggests that those who claim to have definitive knowledge about future economic events may not grasp the complexities and surprises that history reveals, indicating that the past has shown us that certainty in economics is often an illusion.
In practice
During a debate on fiscal policies, one might quote this to emphasize the unpredictability of economic forecasting.
Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.
The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.
There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.
When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.
Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.
Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economising
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
It is credit that matters, not money (in other words, monetarism is a false ideology).
Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.
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