October 17th 2014

Thomas Piketty, director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and professor at the Paris School of Economics, opened the 2014-2015 academic year at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences of the UPF with the welcoming talk entitled "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".

The ceremony was held last October 15th at the Auditorium of the Campus de la Ciutadella, chaired by Jaume Casals, Rector of UPF, and was attended by Vicente Ortún, Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences of the UPF; Jan Eeckhout, representing the direction of the Department of Economics and Business of the UPF; and José-Luis Urbieta, representing Laboratorios del Dr. Esteve, sponsor of the event.

Thomas Piketty (Clichy, France, 1971) is a highly respected academic, with pioneering research on inequality, education and taxes. He is a very present name in the media since his book "Capital in the XXI Century" has became a bestseller worldwide, being compared to the works of Marx and Keynes.

The main thesis of Professor Piketty is that the growth rate of capital is considerably larger than the growth rate of the total production, which necessarily leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, very rich. Currently, according to Piketty, we have returned to inequality levels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and he argues that we can only reverse this trend with a significant governmental intervention.