PERSON
Thomas Piketty
The French economist who proved, across three centuries of tax records, that when the rate of return on capital exceeds economic growth, wealth concentrates by arithmetic necessity—and whose formula r > g now reads as a prophecy about the age of artificial intelligence.
Thomas Piketty spent a decade assembling the most comprehensive empirical record of wealth and income distribution ever compiled—tax records, inheritance registers, national accounts spanning three centuries and more than twenty countries—and distilled it into a formula that fits on a napkin:
r > g. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth concentrates at the top with the reliability of arithmetic. This is not ideology. It is the default behavior of capitalist economies when left without institutional counterweight, and the periods of broadly shared prosperity in the historical record were the product of deliberate political construction—of dams built against a river that, unchecked, returns to concentration as water returns to its channel. What Piketty understood is that the formula’s power lies not in its rate but in its medium:
large language models and the infrastructure that trains them constitute a new form of capital that trains