Notes on Thomas Piketty's Capital


by Patrick Toche, 2015


This page contains material related to Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, 2014).

The html slides may be viewed here: http://ptoche.github.io/

The whole project may be downloaded from: https://github.com/ptoche/piketty

The project contains html5 slides with text and figures (directory named 'slidify') and basic pdf slides with figures only (directory named 'knitr'). Figures are available in pdf, png, and html format.

The project is Open Source.

This project was started in January 2015 and completed in May 2015.

Content


Chapter 00:   Introduction
Chapter 01:   Income and Output
Chapter 02:   Growth: Illusions and Realities
Chapter 03:   The Metamorphoses of Capital
Chapter 04:   From Old Europe to the New World
Chapter 05:   The Capital/Income Ratio Over the Long Run
Chapter 06:   The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 07:   Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings
Chapter 08:   Two Worlds
Chapter 09:   Inequality of Labor Income
Chapter 10:   Inequality of Capital Ownership
Chapter 11:   Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run
Chapter 12:   Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 13:   A Social State for the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 14:   Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax
Chapter 15:   A Global Tax on Capital
Chapter 16:   The Question of the Public Debt

Test Your Knowledge

  1. Exercises
  2. Quizzes

Reproduce the Slides

This website is based on the slidify framework (author: Ramnath Vaidyanathan). The source files are hosted on github and you may download the whole project as a zip file or fork it to a github repository in your account. To compile this website from source, configure the site.yml and run slidify('index.Rmd').

You will need the slidify, slidifyLibraries and rCharts, packages.

install.packages("devtools")  
devtools::install_github(c("slidify", "slidifyLibraries", "rCharts"), 
    "ramnathv", ref = "dev")  

In addition, I often use the following packages: ggplot2, scales, reshape2, plyr (author: Hadley Wickham). I am also using packages grid and png to insert images and control their size. See the source code for a full list of packages used. Make sure these packages are installed in your R system, e.g. run this for each package:

install.packages("ggplot2")

Write a short slide deck and publish it to Github with a few clicks using RStudio, with a single line of code? Learn More »

Layout of the Repository

The lectures folder holds the lecture slides, one subfolder per lecture. The site's architecture looks like this:

assets      -> custom img/js/css/layout assets
data        -> Piketty's data used for the tables and figures
figures     -> png figures built with ggplot2 library
images      -> other images used to illustrate the slides
lectures    -> folder containing lectures
  Chapter 01
  Chapter 02
  Chapter 03, etc.
libraries   -> frameworks, highlighters and widgets
shared      -> custom setup across all lectures, e.g. knitr chunks
tables      -> png tables copied from the book
tests       -> short questions to test students of the book
index.Rmd   -> Rmd source for home page
site.yml    -> Site related configuration
slidify.R   -> Several useful commands to compile the files

Occasional updates have been made since May 2015.

A related project is available here https://github.com/jtleek/capitalIn21stCenturyinR.