PARIS, July 21 — Against the backdrop of a continent still wrestling with the legacy of austerity and the widening fissures of wealth, the figure of Thomas Piketty has become as inescapable as it is divisive. A French economist whose name now moves with ease from the corridors of the Paris School of Economics to the front pages of left-leaning dailies, Piketty’s intellectual journey has been shaped by the very ideologies he set out to dissect.
Born on 7 May 1971 in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, Piketty came of age in a household that had moved past its brief engagement with a Trotskyist group and the May 1968 protests. That particular political inheritance would not survive his formative years.
A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 convinced him to “believe in capitalism, private property and the market.” His academic trajectory was swift and exact. After earning a C-stream (scientific) Baccalauréat, he entered the École Normale Supérieure at 18 to study mathematics and economics. By 22, he had received his PhD from the London School of Economics and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences under Roger Guesnerie, winning the French Economics Association’s award for best thesis.
At LSE he met fellow PhD student Daron Acemoglu. From 1993 to 1995, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, before returning to France to join the French National Centre for Scientific Research as a researcher in 1995.
He became a professor (directeur d’études) at EHESS in 2000. The 2002 prize for best young economist in France followed.
In the orbit of power
By 11 November 2003, he was a member of the scientific orientation board of the association À gauche, en Europe, founded by Michel Rocard and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In 2006 he became the first head of the Paris School of Economics but left after a few months to serve as economic advisor to Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal during the 2007 French presidential election. He returned to teaching at EHESS and PSE in 2007.
He is a columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Libération and writes op-eds for the center-left Le Monde. In April 2012, he co-authored an open letter with 42 colleagues supporting Socialist candidate François Hollande, who won the presidency in May 2012 against incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy; Piketty later described Hollande as “hopeless.” In 2013 he won the biennial Yrjö Jahnsson Award.
What is at stake: his core argument
Piketty’s research focuses on income and wealth inequality. His 2013 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries persistently exceeds economic growth, a dynamic that drives rising wealth inequality. His proposed remedy: improving education and the diffusion of knowledge, skills, and productivity ideas.
His 2019 book Capital and Ideology examines income inequality through a historical lens, while his 2022 book A Brief History of Equality targets citizens with a shorter work on wealth redistribution. The wider picture is that Piketty remains at EHESS and PSE, a Centennial Professor of Economics at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, and a persistent voice in a European debate that shows no signs of cooling.
How his analysis will shape policy on a continent where inequality has become a central political question is what the corridors of Brussels, Paris, and Berlin will continue to watch.
