雅思阅读 150: The Inequality Law of Capital（资本的不平等法则）

改编自 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013/2014)。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：http://piketty-backend.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2014Capital21cRoma.pdf

Reading Passage

A. Few academic books of the last decade have been as widely debated as Thomas Piketty's study of wealth, first published in French in 2013 and translated into English the following year. Stripped to its famous core, the argument fits on a single line: r is greater than g. Here r is the annual return that capital earns over the long run — from rent, dividends, interest and profits — and g is the overall rate at which the economy grows. When capital grows faster than the economy as a whole, the wealth of those who already own capital pulls away from the wages earned by everyone else. The formula is simple enough to print on a T-shirt, yet Piketty supports it with an unusual weight of evidence: more than two centuries of tax records drawn from around twenty countries, assembled with a team of collaborators. The surprise the data delivered is not that inequality rises and falls, but that the unusually equal middle of the twentieth century, in the wealthy world, turns out to be the historical exception rather than the rule. Before the book appeared, it was common to assume that growing equality was a natural by-product of growth; Piketty's charts turned that assumption on its head.

B. The mechanism behind the formula is straightforward to describe and hard to escape. Over long periods, the return on capital has typically run at four or five percent a year, while the output of wealthy economies has grown at something closer to one or two percent. The owner of a fortune can simply reinvest most of what it earns, letting the capital compound faster than the surrounding economy expands. A person who lives mainly from wages, by contrast, can save only a slice of each year's earnings and cannot, however hard they work, match the compounding of an existing pile of assets. This is not, Piketty stresses, a failure of markets working badly. It is the opposite: the more perfectly capital can flow and earn its return, the more decisively r pulls away from g. Inequality, on this reading, is not the fault of corruption or a broken system; It is the ordinary tendency of capital to accumulate, unless something intervenes to slow it. This is why his argument unsettles readers of every political persuasion: it locates the source of rising inequality not in bad laws but in the quiet mathematics of compound interest. A worker earning a steady salary and a family that already owns capital are, on this view, playing a game with rules stacked against the first from the start.

C. That something, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, was catastrophe. The First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression, and the high taxes imposed to pay for all three together destroyed, seized or diluted the large fortunes that had dominated the nineteenth century. Old landed and dynastic wealth was physically scattered or taxed away, and for a generation or two the rich no longer recovered their old share of national income. It is this post-war compression that later generations took to be the natural order — a world in which a hard-working professional could plausibly expect to catch up with an inherited fortune through a lifetime of salary. Piketty's central historical point is that this was never normal. Once reconstruction was complete and the disruptions faded, the underlying force of r greater than g reasserted itself, and the share of wealth held at the very top began, slowly at first, to climb again.

D. The return of old-style wealth shows up most clearly in the revival of inheritance. Through the post-war decades, bequests were a smaller part of the economy, because the wars had broken the transmission of fortunes from one generation to the next. From the late twentieth century, gifts and inheritances once again began to account for a rising share of annual national income, and the young rich increasingly included people who had simply been born to rich parents rather than inventors or founders. This sharpens a moral complaint that runs through the book. If a society believes that rewards should reflect effort and talent — a meritocratic ideal — then a world in which inherited capital steadily outruns earned income sits uneasily with that story. Wealth, on Piketty's evidence, is increasingly passed down rather than earned, and the popular belief that anyone who works hard can join the rich may, over time, rest on a shrinking foundation. A society that congratulates itself on being a meritocracy while its largest fortunes are simply inherited has, on this reading, mistaken a brief postwar pause for a permanent order of things.

E. The remedy Piketty proposes is as bold as the diagnosis is sobering: a global, progressive tax on wealth, levied on the stock of capital itself rather than only on the income it produces, so that the very fortunes that compound fastest are taxed enough to slow their concentration. The proposal is also the book's most contested point. Critics reply that such a tax is politically near-impossible to coordinate across countries, that capital would simply move to wherever it is lightly taxed, and that heavy levies on wealth may discourage the saving and investment that everyone benefits from. Some economists, too, have disputed details of the underlying data and the way the top share is measured. Yet whatever one makes of the remedy, the book's historical picture has proved harder to dismiss. By showing that the last equal generation lived through world wars, and that capital normally drifts toward concentration, Piketty recast the debate: inequality, in his account, is not an accident to be fixed but a force to be deliberately, and politically, counteracted. Whether governments muster the will to do so is, he insists, a choice about the kind of society people actually want to live in.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why r > g is hard to escape ii. The exceptional equal middle of the twentieth century iii. How the income tax was invented iv. The return of inherited wealth and the meritocracy question v. A bold remedy — and its critics vi. The history of stock markets vii. Why wages have always dominated wealth

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. In Piketty's famous formula, r refers to A. the rate of economic growth. B. the annual return on capital. C. the rate of inflation. D. the unemployment rate.

6. Over the long run, Piketty found that capital typically earns about A. one or two percent a year. B. four or five percent a year. C. ten percent a year. D. zero percent a year.

7. Why was the mid-twentieth century unusually equal, according to Piketty? A. Because markets worked perfectly. B. Because wars, depression and high taxes destroyed or diluted large fortunes. C. Because no one owned capital. D. Because wages were abolished.

8. What is Piketty's proposed remedy? A. A global progressive tax on wealth. B. Abolishing all taxes. C. Fixing wages by law. D. Nationalising all land.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Piketty's evidence draws on more than two centuries of tax records from around twenty countries.
10. Piketty argues that rising inequality is mainly caused by corruption and broken markets.
11. The post-war decades saw a revival of large inherited fortunes.
12. Critics argue a global wealth tax may be hard to coordinate across countries.
13. Piketty was elected president of France in 2012.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

When the return on (14) _____________ exceeds economic (15) _____________, accumulated fortunes compound faster than wages can grow.

答案与解析

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