We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume re… - Thomas Piketty

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts – and that is a very good thing.

There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same treaties.

How do wealth- and capital-output ratios evolve in the long run, and why? Until recently it was difficult to properly address this question, for one simple reason: national accounts were mostly about flows, not stocks. Economists had at their disposal a large body of historical series on flows of output, income and consumption – but limited data on stocks of assets and liabilities. When needed, for example for growth accounting exercises, estimates of capital stocks were typically obtained by cumulating past flows of saving and investment. This is fine for some purposes, but severely limits the set of questions one can ask.