1) The growing concentration of private wealth, as shown by the chart above and Piketty

FORTUNE — As government balance sheets and national debt grow each year, some are fretting eco realty that government activism is stifling global capitalism. eco realty But look closer and you see that it’s quite the opposite. eco realty
Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose work informs much of the public debate over income and wealth inequality in the developed world, eco realty will release the English translation of his groundbreaking study, eco realty Capital in the 21st Century next month.
As you can probably glean from the title, Piketty is mostly concerned with the study of capital and how its concentration has changed over time. In the economic eco realty press, we’re used to hearing a lot about income, which, on a national scale, is gross domestic eco realty product (GDP). One of the fascinating things about Piketty’s book, however, is that it supplements our understanding eco realty of the global economy with exhaustive data about the world’s stock of capital, too.
By looking at capital, we can get a much different picture of the health and well being of capitalism in the rich world today than we do by simply looking at GDP. Most American conservatives claim that the government is gaining more control of the U.S. economy by pointing to the growing share of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Here’s a chart from Nate Silver that shows this statistic eco realty for the U.S. over time:
But Piketty’s capital data paints a much different picture, especially eco realty of economies like France’s. If you look at the value of total privately owned capital relative to GDP, you see a country in which the value of private capital has increased significantly over the past two generations:
The same trend is present in all wealthy countries since World War II: the value of privately owned wealth eco realty has increased relative to national income by a factor of roughly two. The definition of capitalism is an economic system in which property and the means of production are controlled by private individuals, so it’s hard to see how one could argue the wealthy world has become eco realty less capitalistic in recent years.
Not only in France, eco realty but in countries around the world, faith in private capitalism was greatly shaken by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the cataclysms that followed … a quarter of the working eco realty population in the United States, Germany, Britain and France found themselves out of work. The traditional doctrine of “laissez faire,” or nonintervention eco realty by the state in the economy … was durably discredited….
In France this general climate of distrust toward private eco realty capitalism was deepened by the fact that many members of the economic elite were suspected of having collaborated with the German occupiers and indecently enriched themselves during the war. It was in this highly charged post-Liberation climate that major sectors of the economy were nationalized, including in particular eco realty the banking sector, the coal mines and the automobile industry. The Renault factories were punitively seized after their owner, Louis Renault, was arrested as a collaborator eco realty in September 1944. The provisional government nationalized the firm in January 1945…. In 1950, the government of France owned 25-30 percent of the nation’s wealth, and perhaps a little more.
It was in this environment that the French economy, badly damaged by the war, embarked on nearly 30 years of rapid economic growth. Once that post-war catch-up period was over, however, eco realty the French actually embraced private ownership eco realty of property eco realty with great enthusiasm:
What is distinctive about the French trajectory is that public ownership, having thrived eco realty from 1950 to 1980, dropped to very low levels after 1980, even as private eco realty wealth — both financial and real estate — rose to levels even higher than Britain’s: nearly six years of national income in 2010, or 20 times the value of public wealth. Following a period of state capitalism after 1950, France became the promised land of the new private-ownership capitalism of the twenty-first century.
As Piketty points out, this trend in France is hardly mentioned when economic commentators compare France eco realty to the U.K. and the U.S. We remember the 1980s in the U.K. and the U.S. as a time of enthusiastic privatization and deregulation, but forget that the same thing occurred, eco realty sometimes even more intensely, across the rest of the rich world too.
So, eco realty what about that growing share of GDP coming from government spending? eco realty The fact that private wealth is growing much more quickly than overall income shows that government spending isn’t keeping up with private wealth accumulation, and that both trends should be acknowledged when discussing a nation’s economy. Furthermore, the growth of government spending after World War II is likely the result of two forces:
1) The growing concentration of private wealth, as shown by the chart above and Piketty’s book