People From Paris

"'Simultaneousness' is a technique. Simultaneous contrast is the most up-to-date honey of this technique in this field. Simultaneous contrast is visible depth – Reality, Form, construction, representation. Depth is the new inspiration. We live in depth, we travel in depth. I’m in it. The senses are in it. And the mind is too."

"The need for a new subject has inspired the poets, launching them onto a fresh path and bringing to their attention to poetry of la Tour [the Eiffel tower in Paris], which communicates mysteriously with the whole world. Rays of light, waves of symphonic sounds. Factories, bridges, iron structures, airships, the numberless gyrations of aeroplanes, windows seen by crowd simultaneously."

"The woman of City of Paris' [Delaunay painted in 1910 – 1912] sums up the [his] Cubist period.. ..'The Cardiff team' [he painted in 1913] is more significant in the expression of colour, less shattered. The yellow poster in the complete picture contrasts with the blues, greens and orange."

"What they are saying is okay [the Futurist artists like Severini, Carra and Russolo, who debated in Paris intensively with the Cubist artists]."

"I am trying to put the distributional question and the study of long-run trends back at the heart of economic analysis. In that sense, I am pursuing a tradition which was pioneered by the economists of the 19th century, including David Ricardo and Karl Marx. One key difference is that I have a lot more historical data. With the help of , , Facundo Alvaredo, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Gabriel Zucman and many other scholars, we have been able to collect a unique set of data covering three centuries and over 20 countries. This is by far the most extensive database available in regard to the historical evolution of income and wealth. This book proposes an interpretative synthesis based upon this collective data collection project."

"We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics."

"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."

"The right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling."

"The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that."

"Recently, prominent historians and economists, among them Walter Scheidel and Thomas Piketty, have argued persuasively that major wars can also act to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and that the experience of the nations involved in the First and Second World Wars bears this out. Major wars stimulate employment; labour becomes more valuable so wages and benefits go up; and the rich pay higher taxes voluntarily, or find it harder to avoid doing so. At the end of destructive wars it is also easier to contemplate major programmes of reconstruction and social benefits and gain support for them. As William Beveridge, whose report laid the foundations for the British welfare state, wrote, ‘Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolution, not for patching.’"

"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."

"The tragedy is that Trump’s program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality."

"Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them."

"Ceta, the EU-Canada free trade deal, should be rejected. It is a treaty which belongs to another age. This strictly commercial treaty contains absolutely no restrictive measures concerning fiscal or climate issues. It does, however, contain a considerable reference to the “protection of investors”. This enables multinationals to sue states under private arbitration courts, bypassing the public tribunals available to one and all. The legal supervision proposed is clearly inadequate, in particular concerning the key question of the remuneration of the arbitrators-cum-referees and will lead to all sorts of abuses. At the very time when American legal imperialism is gaining in strength and imposing its rules and its dues on our companies, this decline in public justice is an aberration. The priority, on the contrary, should be the construction of strong public authorities, with the creation of a prosecutor, including a European state prosecutor, capable of enforcing their decisions."

"Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon."

"Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). ... The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably, this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past, and therefore to inheritance."

"The overall importance of capital today, as noted, is not very different from what it was in the eighteenth century. Only its form has changed: capital was once mainly land but is now industrial, financial, and real estate. We also know that the concentration of wealth remains high, although it is noticeably less extreme than it was a century ago. The poorest half of the population still owns nothing, but there is now a patrimonial middle class that owns between a middle and a third of total wealth, and the wealthiest ten percent now own only-two thirds of what there is to own rather than nine-tenths."

"I can now present the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. The formula is"

"A balanced treaty between Canada and Europe, aimed at promoting a partnership for fair and sustainable development, should begin by specifying the emission targets of each signatory and the practical commitments to achieve these."

"Capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market."

"Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this."

"When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."

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

"Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in."

"Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality—or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II."

"In many ways, the US led the world toward the development of progressive taxation and the reduction of inequality at the global level during the first half of the 20th century... Unfortunately, one century later, in 2019, the rise of inequality creates new threats to liberal democracies. It is time to take a new step and to develop new policy instruments, in line with the challenges raised by global wealth trends."

"To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics."

"The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?"

"It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail."

"National income is defined as the sum of all income available to the residents of a given country in a given year, regardless of the legal classification of that income."

"[About Goldsmith's long absences owing to having three families] It was normal. I considered other people's families to be slightly odd. I certainly never resented it, because I get on so well with my brothers and sisters, from the youngest, who is 10, to the oldest who is 45.""

"There was a period, from 16 to 19, where we really hit the rocks in terms of our relationship. But even at the worst times, following a monumental row, you couldn't not respect him. I always saw in him - and I would have been a fool not to have seen in him - a greatness."

"He was a very odd character."

"I think reporting in England is a load of filth, and that's why I'm going into the newspaper business there."

"The awful thing is, I find I feel sorry for him. ..."

"When you marry your mistress you automatically create a vacancy."

"I remember knocking on doors in Putney, asking people to vote for him. Some people loved him, other people thought he was the most terrifying creature they had ever heard of, and they thought he wanted to became a sort of dictator of the country. And you can understand that. He was a very exotic character. His family life was exotic. Everything he did was different. I have never met anyone like him and I shouldn't think I ever will meet anyone like him. So I am not surprised he had a rough time. He didn't mind that. He was sort of like a military commander. He was used to hostility."

"I'm not a great believer in the see-through society."

"A tall, restless, nail-biting man, expensively dressed, he looked at least ten years older than forty - three. His face was tanned, his eyes steely blue. In repose, his expression was peculiarly dead. But his face would frequently crinkle into a smile and — which was disconcerting — from time to time he looked straight across at me, nodding and grinning, as if trying to convey a message of some kind."

"In [his article] La Peinture et ses lois ['Painting and its Laws', 1924] Gleizes deduced the rules of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the laws of the universe. This theory, later referred to as translation-rotation, ranks with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms.""

"We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile."

"But we cannot enjoy in isolation; we wish to dazzle others with that which we daily snatch from the world of sense, and in return we wish others to show us their trophies. From a reciprocity of concessions arise those mixed images, which we hasten to confront with artistic creations in order to compute what they contain of the objective; that is of the purely conventional"

"The first manifestations of Cubism took people by surprise because their minds, ill-adapted as they are to the idea of movement, are never able, on the basis of what is in front of them, to envisage what is to come."

"In opposition to the immobile means of expression that the Academy was teaching, these painters threw down like a challenge a mobile expression; to volumes situated in space they preferred the living dynamism of coloured form in evolution."

"If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems."

"Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings - and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself - appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever."

"All the constructions of this first phase of the youth of the group bear witness to its constant characteristics. The epic imagination is a proof of its esemplastic power. Everything is formal, inventive and arithmetical, therefore rhythmic."

"We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone."

"To understand Cézanne is to foresee Cubism. Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat."

"Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer."