Economic History :
Capital, Inequality, Growth
(Master APE & PPD, Paris School of Economics)
Thomas Piketty
Academic year 2015-2016
Syllabus & Course Material
(check on line for updated versions)
• Email : piketty@psemail.eu
• Office hours: Tuesdays 9h-12h, Jourdan B101
• Course web page :
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/teaching/10/17
(check on-line for updated versions)
• The objective of this course is to present an introduction
to economic history. Issues will include the following.
• How did the world distribution of output, income and
wealth - both between and within countries - evolve
since 1800, and how can we account for these changes?
What was the interaction with the growth and capital
accumulation process? Did inequality contribute to the
2008 financial crisis? How does this differ from 1929 ?
• Can we properly understand economic issues with
representative-agent economic models?
• No. We need to study history and institutions: legal
system, welfare state, taxation, etc. And to understand
institutions, we need to study property, inequality and
beliefs systems about the economy and the just society.
• This course will take for the most part an historical and
positive perspective on distributional issues
• For references on normative models of optimal
redistribution, see my Public Economics course
• The course is organized in 8 classes of 3 hours
(7 lectures + 1 exam)
• To validate the course, students are required :
(1) to attend and actively participate to all lectures;
(2) to take the exam
(examples of past exams from another course are here)
A quick roadmap of the lectures
• Lecture 1: Income, capital and growth since
1800: how did rich countries become rich?
(Tuesday September 8th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 2: The dynamics of capital accumulation:
private vs public capital and the Great
Transformation
(Tuesday September 15th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 3: Inequality in the long-run: labor
income vs capital ownership
(Tuesday September 22nd 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 4: Historical demography, family structures and the
population transition
(Tuesday September 29th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 5: Slavery, forced labor and political rights in
historical perspective
(Tuesday October 6th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 6: Money, finance and crisis in historical perspective
(Tuesday October 13th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 7: Government intervention and the regulation of
capital and inequality
(Tuesday October 27th 2015, 13h45-16h45)
• Lecture 8: Exam (Tuesday November 3rd 2015, 13h45-16h45)
General references
To a large extent the course will follow this book:
• T. Piketty, Capital in the 21st century, Harvard Univ. Press 2014
I will also draw heavily on the following two books:
• A. Maddison, The World Economy – A Millennial Perspective, OECD
2001 (database (xls)) (pdf)(website)
• P. Lindert, Growing Public – Social Spending and Economic Growth
since the 18th Century, Oxford Univ. Press 2004
• See also «Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics »,
Journal of Economic Perspectives 2015
« Vers une économie politique et historique », Annales – Histoire,
sciences sociales 2015
Reading list
• Lecture 1
• Lecture 2
General references in economic history:
• TK
• K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944; 1957
• F. Braudel
• J. Diamond; Tilly?
• R. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global
Perspective, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007
• D. Acemoglu, J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail - The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Random House, 2012
General references on historical inequality dynamics:
• S. Kuznets, 1953
• A. Atkinson, A. Harrison,1978
• A. Atkinson, T. Piketty, E. Saez, « Top Incomes in the Long Run
of History », JEL 2010
• F. Alvaredo, A. Atkinson, T. Piketty, E. Saez, “The Top 1% in
International and Historical Perspective“, JEP 2013 (updated
series on the World Wealth and Incomes Database)
• T. Piketty, G. Zucman, « Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios
in Rich Countries 1700-2010 “, QJE 2014, slides, data appendix
• T. Piketty, G. Zucman, “Wealth and Inheritance in the LongRun”, Handbook of Income Distribution, 2015
• T. Piketty, E. Saez, “Inequality in the long run”, Science 2014
• “About Capital in the 21st century”, AER 2015 (other symposia)