And now he wanted the wealth shared more evenly.
But, as a child of the 1960s, nothing prepared me to anticipate what we are witnessing today: increasing wealth discrepancies, between workers and their CEOs, or between the rapid improvements in living standards experienced in some parts of the world, while other regions suffer in ways that are difficult to comprehend given the wealth shared by some of us.
The wealth share of emerging markets is expected to pick up pace again.
For example, Giles points out that Piketty seems to add an arbitrary two per cent to the wealth share of the top one per cent in 1970.
The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90%, according to the report's authors.
An innovative new study by Saez and Gabriel Zucman, also of Berkeley, says that the wealth share of the top 0.1 per cent of households — the very, very rich — has risen sharply and consistently since the mid-seventies.
Giles argues that when he returns to the data and assembles them correctly, there is no tendency for the wealth share of the top 1% or the top 10% in advanced industrialised countries to have risen since 1980.
(iii) There does not appear to be an increase in the wealth shares of the top 1% or the top 10% between 2000 and 2010 in the raw data: conversely, Piketty's data shows a slight increase.
However, the wealth share of the top 10% has still increased substantially since 1980 using the raw data; there has also been an increase since 1980 for the top 1% but this pattern is less marked.
Oxfam, by examining the trends since 2010 and extrapolating into the future, shows the wealth share of the top one per cent going up and up; it passes fifty per cent by next year, and rises past fifty-four per cent by 2020, painting a picture of a world in which wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of the élite.
The wealth share of the rich in France rises steadily over this period, for example; on the eve of the first world war, the top 1% in France control 60% of all wealth.Mr Crook rather uncharitably questions the motivations of those more taken with the book.
