Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century. Stephan Kaufmann

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      •In France and Britain, the capital–income ratio between 1700 and 1910 amounted to about 7, then fell until 1950 to about 2.5 in Britain and less than 3 in France. After that, it rose again and approached a value of 5 in Britain and almost 6 in France in the year 2010.

      •In the US, things looked similar, even if the ratio was initially low and only rose to 5 until 1910. Then it fell rapidly, ultimately stabilized between 5 and 5.5, and fell again after 1929 to 4 (in the year 1950). Only from the 1980s did inequality in the US increase again, and in 2010 reached about 4.5 – with a tendential rise. The inequality curve in the industrial countries accordingly takes the form of a ‘U’, whereby 1913 and the present constitute the peaks so far for the Western industrial countries.¹⁵

      How capital has changed

      According to Piketty, in the last 200 years, not only has the capital–income ratio changed, but also the forms in which capital exists. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not yet characterized by industrial capital. Back then, wealth existed primarily in the form of farmland and government bonds. Thus agricultural land was one of the most important investments for capital until the nineteenth century and yielded a ground rent between 4 and 5 per cent. Taxes and inflation were low, which made public bonds an important form of investment for regular income. Moreover, we know from novels or biographies of various figures that, during this period, inheritances were central for building wealth, among other things in order to pursue certain life paths. Not infrequently, some waited with longing for their inheritances to come due. At this point, Piketty could have quoted the penniless Karl Marx, who wrote in 1852 to his friend Friedrich Engels concerning his uncle: ‘If the cur dies now I shall be out of this pickle.’ Marx was hoping for an inheritance after he had come up ‘empty’ after the death of his father. Engels replied to Marx: ‘My congratulations on the news of the illness of the old Brunswick inheritance-thwarter; I trust the catastrophe will at last come to pass.’¹⁶

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