Capital in the Twenty-First Century

As with my first attempt about 2 years back, I’m struggling to get through the whole book. The level of detail is great, but too much for me personally to get through. I will continue to the conclusions to see if I can find anything else that I want/should mention before writing down my notes.

In the end I did finish the whole book and found it a very interesting read/listen. Here are some pointers:

• Inequality is real and growing
• That by itself isn’t perse bad, but the consequences of it, and the position it brings a large portion of the population in, is bad
• It’s poverty we don’t want to have / want to reduce, and to raise the living standards of millions. (also see Factfulness)
• Capital makes more money than wages ( r (rents) is greater than g (growth)). There really isn’t a way around it
• Population isn’t growing much in level 4 (developed) countries, and this will be the same the world around sooner than later
• Taxation of capital could be the way to go, but with taxation competition between countries, this is very unlikely to happen
• The 1% in terms of wealth is much richer than the 1% of income. Many (from memory 40%+) doesn’t really own anything. A very small percentage owns most
• And when talking about that small percentage, focus on the 1-5%, not the 0,0001%, they might have a higher relative percentage, but in terms of total influence, the former group is much more important

All right, these are my notes for now. I might add some more at another time.