Quote of the week
Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility. Pleasure disappoints, not possibility.
Piketty on taxes
[Thomas Piketty] shrugs: “As a professor I was already, like, in the top five per cent of the income distribution, and with copyrights I moved to the top one per cent or 0.1 per cent, so it’s not as if I was very low to begin with. I would have liked to pay 90 per cent tax on my copyright. I paid about 60 per cent but I think this is not enough. First, books are also speculative markets, so when you sell 2.5 million copies, it doesn’t mean your book is 1,000 times better than someone who sold 2,500 copies. I’m not naïve about that. I know how everybody at some point wants to read the same book – or buy the same book.
