Thomas Piketty

Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict
The Inaugural James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality

Thomas Piketty
Professor at EHESS and the Paris School of Economics.
Author of the international best-seller, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'
Douglas Elmendorf (Moderator)
Dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Join Thomas Piketty as he explores the relationship between rising inequality and changing structures of political conflict, from class-based to identity-based. Why hasn’t democracy slowed rising inequality? He will present new findings from the recently-released World Inequality Report 2018 and his latest work on changing political cleavages to answer this question.

*Please Note: Floor seats will be reserved for Harvard ID holders. All seating is available on a first-arrive basis. Doors will close when capacity is reached.

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Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, Explorations in Economic History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, and of a dozen books. He has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development and the distribution of income and wealth. In particular, he is the initiator of the recent literature on the long run evolution of top income shares in national income (now available in the World Wealth and Income Database). These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. He is also the author of the international best-seller Capital in the 21st Century.

Douglas W. Elmendorf began his tenure as dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School in January 2016. He had been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution after serving as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015. Before CBO, he spent two years at Brookings, where he was a senior fellow, the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar, and the director of the Hamilton Project. He was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a principal analyst at CBO, a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. In those positions, Elmendorf worked on budget policy, health care issues, the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and a range of other topics. He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton University.