"PIKETTY: If you look at the top of the wealth distribution, I don’t see a lot of real estate. I don’t think Matt Rognlie or anyone is saying that the huge rise in billionaire wealth in the US has anything to do with real estate. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to put this theory on the table.
"I’m not saying real estate is not important. I think for middle-class assets and lower-middle-class and upper-middle-class assets — for the middle of the distribution — real estate is, of course, very important. The movement in real estate prices explains a lot of what’s going on, both in terms of aggregate value and distribution. I’m not saying it’s not important. It is very important.
"If you go back to our paper with Gabriel Zucman, which was published, now, almost 10 years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2014, called “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700–2010,” you will see, we have complete decomposition about the role of real estate in aggregate wealth accumulation, and it’s absolutely central for many countries over many periods of time."
Also, non sequitur: while I enjoyed A Brief History of Equality, I feel that it tried to stuff too much historical detail into so short a work - it reads a bit like a condensed version of Capital and Ideology. I found the most enlightening parts of Piketty's previous works involved the tracing of political and economic minutiae across time and space, and I'm not sure I would have actually enjoyed A Brief History of Equality if I didn't already have that background.