Thomas Piketty, Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and professor at the Paris School of Economics, gave the 25th Economics Lecture at Pompeu Fabra University. His lecture was entitled " Capital in the Twenty-First Century", like the bestseller he wrote in 2013, and his speech began the 2014-2015 academic year in the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences.

The event, which took place in the Ciutadella Campus Auditorium at 11:30 am on 15 October, amidst great excitement, was chaired by Jaume Casals, the rector of UPF, and attended by Vicente Ortún, Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences; Jan Eeckhout, representing the Department of Economics and Business, and José-Luis Urbieta, the Laboratories representative of Dr. Esteve, the event's sponsor.

Jaume Casals began the event by recalling that a few years ago (during the 2006-2007 academic year), when he was vice-rector, he chaired the Economics Lecture given by Jean Tirole, the French economist who recently been awarded won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

After the rector's opening comments, Vicente Ortún recalled the various strong points of the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences at UPF, which have made it the first centre in its field to have an internationalization quality certificate awarded by thirteen European rating agencies.

According to the dean, this recognition is due to aspects such as the lack of endogamy, the fact that two-thirds of classes are taught in English, the quality of students, the density of international mobility exchanges, the large and varied range of paid internships and UPF's good position in rankings.

After being introduced by Jan Eeckhout, who highlighted the history and significance of the speaker's research, Thomas Piketty began his Economics Lecture on " Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (PDF document, in English, 57 slides)

From the four sections in his book, professor Piketty presented some of his findings in the second part (The dynamics of the capital/income ratio ) and the third part (The structure of inequalities), and focused above all on data from the United States and Europe.

His presentation was based around three points: first, the return to a patrimonial society, based on wealth in traditional societies (such as Europe or Japan). According to Piketty, "wealth-income ratios seem to be returning to very high levels in low growth countries". This leads him to think that "in a slow-growth society, wealth accumulated in the past can naturally become very important".

Piketty then turned to the future of wealth concentration: "wealth inequality might reach or surpass nineteenth century oligarchic levels," he said - an inequality that could be democratized if the appropriate institutions take action; and finally, he discussed inequality in America.

Piketty said that "when private capital increases, public capital decreases," and that in Europe, "the increase in private capital has been greater than the increase in public debt. It has nothing to be ashamed of." Furthermore, he said that "the concentration of wealth today remains very high, but less extreme".

In his conclusions section, professor Piketty explained that the history of income and wealth inequality is always political, chaotic and unpredictable as it involves national identities and sharp reversals, and as such nobody can predict the reversals of the future.

His ideal possible solution would be to create a progressive wealth tax on a global scale, based on the exchange of bank information. Other solutions would involve authoritarian political and capital controls (China and Russia), perpetual population growth (the USA), inflation, or a mixture of all of these.

After the lecture, there was a question and answer session, in which students at the Faculty were able to talk to the speaker - the twenty-fifth to give the inaugural lecture (including nine Nobel Prize laureates) since the long degree course was launched in the Balmes building in the 1990-1991 academic year.

An expert on inequality and education and the author of a bestseller

Thomas Piketty (born Clichy, France, 1971) is undoubtedly one of the most famous economists of our time, which is partly due to the global impact of his book Capital in the Twenty-First C entury, which he originally wrote in French in 2013 (and which has been translated into English and the Spanish in 2014), in which he examines the evolution of wealth inequality in twenty countries over three centuries.

Professor Piketty is a highly renowned academic, who has undertaken pioneering research on inequality, education and taxes. He has become a household name in the last year after his book became a worldwide bestseller, and it has been compared to the works of Marx and Keynes. His main thesis is that the growth rate of capital is considerably higher than that of total production, which necessarily leads to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few very rich individuals.

The second half of the twentieth century was only a more egalitarian era as a result of two world wars and the consequent destruction of capital. Now, according to Piketty, we have returned to the inequality levels of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, and he argues that this trend can only be reversed with substantial government intervention.

Photo Galery of the Economics Lecture