Concretely, what this means is that if the gap between the return on capital and the growth rate is as
high as that observed in France in the nineteenth century, when the average rate of return was 5
percent a year and growth was roughly 1 percent, the model predicts that the cumulative dynamics of
wealth accumulation will automatically give rise to an extremely high concentration of wealth, with
typically around 90 percent of capital owned by the top decile and more than 50 percent by the top
centile.