In 2024, income from investment returns surges by 32% [1]. According to France Stratégie, reported by the Observatory on Inequalities, 96% of these dividends end up in the hands of 1% of tax households [10]. This figure reveals the narrowing of the economy’s engine, beyond the enrichment of a small number. When capital is this concentrated, it finances fewer companies, fuels less productive savings, protects fewer retirements. The challenge facing 2027 is clear: expand the number of French people who own capital, not simply redistribute the rents of a small minority.
2,228 euros median monthly income, but record poverty since 1996
In 2024, median living standards reach 2,228 euros per month [1]. After redistribution, this level is 7.8% higher than in 2008 in constant euros [1]. Between 2023 and 2024, it grows by 1.8% [1].
This average progression masks opposing trajectories. Income from investment returns declared to the tax administration, including dividends, increases by 32% in 2024 [1]. The living standards of the least well-off had fallen in 2023 in constant euros, owing to the non-renewal of purchasing power support measures that were active in 2022 [2].
In 2024, two of the three main inequality indicators reach their highest level since 1996 [1]. The poverty rate stood at 15.4% in 2023, a record since tracking began [2]. More than one single-parent family in three lives below the poverty threshold, at 34.3% in 2023 [2]. The poverty rate for those under 18 reached 21.9% the same year [2]. In number of children, this represented 2.9 million [2].
Over the long term, a sharp decline in inequalities had begun in the early years of the First World War. An unequal trend re-emerged in the mid-1980s [5]. This rupture has never been reversed.
Wealth: the boundary that decides everything
Wealth inequalities operate in a different category than income inequalities. In 2024, half of households have gross wealth exceeding 205,000 euros [3]. The 10% of best-endowed households hold nearly half of total wealth [3].
At the other end of the scale, the 10% least wealthy possess a maximum of 6,200 euros in 2024, the equivalent of a used car [3]. Over the preceding ten years, once inflation is accounted for, their wealth ceiling advanced by 700 euros [3]. Households situated between the 10th and 40th percentiles in wealth have recorded no real progress over the same period [3]. For the wealthier half, by contrast, the increase is 10 to 15% [3].
Over twenty years, the gap has widened. The measure of gross wealth concentration (a score between 0, perfect equality, and 1, total concentration) rose from 0.639 to 0.662 between 1998 and 2021, mainly due to rising real estate prices [4]. The Bank of France measures recent acceleration, based on European Central Bank data [11]. The share held by the less wealthy half stagnates at 5% of total wealth. That of the 10% most affluent has risen by 1.7 points and reached more than 54% at the end of 2023 [11].
This widening wealth gap has a direct consequence for future income. Dividends increased by 10% in 2022, and again by 10% in 2023 [10]. These revenues affect only an infinitesimal fraction of the population. In 2021, according to France Stratégie, reported by the Observatory on Inequalities, 96% of dividends are attributed to 1% of all tax households [10]. When capital is distributed so narrowly, the entire economy deprives itself of shareholders, productive savers and retirements less dependent on the pay-as-you-go system alone.
Closure as destiny, openness as political choice
Societies systematically prosper when they embrace openness to trade, ideas and people, and decline when they retreat from it. This is the central thesis of Johan Norberg in Peak Human (2025) [12]. His most original contribution is to treat golden ages not as peaks on an upward slope, but as unstable equilibria. These equilibria are productive because they relax constraints on commerce, belief, identity, enterprise. But they are unstable: the relaxation threatens control.
The mechanism of decline follows a precise pattern [12]. Status anxiety sets in. Fear of disruption drives closure. Orthodoxy solidifies. French data illustrate this.
Golden ages empower outsiders (merchants, immigrants, innovators) whose success threatens established hierarchies [12]. As wealth accumulates, the incentive to control entry and restrict competition strengthens. Elites discover that closure is safer than openness, once they have something worth protecting.
Those relying solely on work income have encountered increased difficulty accessing high wealth since the 1970s [5]. Norberg documents this mechanism of closure at the top in the history of Song China or the Dutch Republic. French data document it in the present. The growing concentration of wealth income in the hands of the top 1% is its direct expression [12].
The key variable is capital’s share in national distribution. Labor’s share in added value has declined since the 1990s in most large OECD countries [6]. In France’s private sector, the share of total wages held by the top 1% of earners rose from 7% to 8% between 1998 and 2017 [5].
The divergence is even sharper on capital income. In 1970, the 1% wealthiest in assets received 28.7% of total capital income [5]. In 2014, this share stood at 34% [5]. In the same period, their share in work income fell from 4.6% to 2.8% [5]. Those at the top live less and less from their work and more and more from their rents.
Redistribution compensates, it does not correct
The political reflex when facing this picture is to increase redistribution. The data invite nuance on this shortcut. France already redistributes massively: its public spending represents 57.3% of GDP in 2024 [8]. The European Union average is 49.1% the same year [8]. Social protection spending reaches 32.6 percentage points of GDP in France, against 27.0 points on average in Europe [8].
Yet inequalities before redistribution remain among the highest in the European Union. The measure of gross income concentration (a high score means more inequality) stands at 37.0 in France in 2024, against an average of 35.1 for the eurozone [7]. Before any redistribution, France ranks among the most unequal countries, just after the United States and the United Kingdom.
Once taxes are paid, it arrives in the middle of the table. The measure of net income concentration falls to 29.9 in 2024 [7]. In the United Kingdom, it remains at 36.7. In the United States, at 39.4 [7].
This apparent redistributive success reveals the true mechanism. France first produces its inequalities at a rate among the highest in Europe, then attenuates them at great cost. When examining inequalities before pensions and retirement contributions, France is the most unequal country among European Union members [7].
Correcting downstream without acting upstream amounts to emptying the sea with a spoon, while leaving the taps open. Financing redistribution through borrowing postpones the correction of inequalities to future generations, without touching the mechanism that produces them. This is the social debt that Nicolas Dufourcq documented in The Social Debt of France (Odile Jacob, 2025) [13].
Broadening the base of capital holders rather than redistributing the rents of a small number
The institutional arrangements that generate prosperity are continuously threatened by the success they themselves produce, as the long history of golden ages shows [12]. Applied to income and wealth, this framework leads to four levers, distinct from the redistributive reflex.
Produce primary income less concentrated. The 1.8% progression in median living standards in 2024 is driven by wages and employment [1]. Each additional percentage point of employment rate in the lower and middle distribution reduces primary inequalities more effectively than an additional percentage point of contributions. Bertrand Martinot has mapped institutional brakes: work taxation at the bottom of the scale, inadequate training, complexity of transitions [14]. These are the locks that must be unlocked.
Open access to capital for middle and working classes. In 2024, tens of millions of French people receive no dividend income. This is the result of a fiscal and institutional architecture that has never organized their entry into shareholding [10].
Policies on employee savings, employee shareholding and property ownership can invest the 20 to 30% of households with the least wealth, where no capital exists today. Growth through creative destruction supposes that outsiders can enter the game, and therefore that they have the resources to do so [15]. Multiplying the number of small shareholders also means broadening the financing base for companies and reducing dependence on foreign markets.
Treat capital income with the same rigor as work income. In France, the taxation rate on salaries at the median salary level is 44% [9]. For twenty times the median salary, it rises to 64% [9].
The taxation rate on dividends for an equivalent amount is 41% [9]. This differential (measured on OECD data) structurally fuels wealth divergence. The reform aims at fiscal neutrality between earned income and capital income, without adding a tax on existing wealth.
Maintain openness to outsiders. Norberg warns that in times of crisis, individuals and societies seek stability and turn away from what is unpredictable [12]. Golden ages have each known their moment of closure: reversal against open intellectual exchange, support for strong men, abandonment of international trade. The protectionist temptation responds to genuine distress, but structurally worsens the situation it claims to relieve.
The budget constraint is real. At 57.3% of GDP in 2024, France has very little room to increase spending without affecting its competitiveness [8]. This makes it all the more urgent to partially substitute compensation spending with policies on training, employment and access to capital, which act on primary income rather than on its correction after the fact.
The choice facing 2027 is precisely there. To continue compensating primary divergence through redistribution is to commit to growing debt that fuels political disillusionment. To act on the mechanisms of income production and wealth access is to make prosperity less dependent on belonging to an asset-holding class. For this second path to remain credible, income growth must actually reach those who have no capital [12].
Sources
[1] INSEE-DGFiP-Cnaf-Cnav-CCMSA, “Living Standards and Poverty in 2024”, Insee Première no. 2117, July 2026, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/9019316 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[2] INSEE, “Living Standards and Poverty in 2023”, Insee Première no. 2063, July 2025, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8600989 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[3] INSEE, “Wealth Amounts Held by Households in 2024”, Insee Focus no. 371, December 2025, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8672665 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[4] INSEE, “Over Twenty Years, Wealth Inequalities Have Increased”, in Household Income and Wealth, 2024 edition, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7941439?sommaire=7941491 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[5] Garbinti B., Goupille-Lebret J., Piketty T., “Income and Wealth Inequalities in France”, Economy and Statistics no. 510-511-512, 2019, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/4253029/510_511_512_Garbinti_Goupille-Lebret_FR.pdf (consulted 09/08/2026).
[6] Cette G., Koehl L., Philippon T., “The Share of Labor over the Long Term: A Decline?”, Economy and Statistics no. 510-511-512, 2019, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/4253021/510_511_512_Cette_Koehl_Philippon_FR.pdf (consulted 09/08/2026).
[7] Ecalle F. (FIPECO), “Income Inequalities and Redistribution in 2024 in France and the European Union”, March 2026, https://www.fipeco.fr/commentaire/Les%20in%C3%A9galit%C3%A9s%20et%20la%20redistribution%20des%20revenus%20en%202024%20en%20France%20et%20dans%20l%27Union%20europ%C3%A9enne (consulted 09/08/2026).
[8] Ecalle F. (FIPECO), “Public Policy Spending in Europe in 2024”, July 2026, https://fipeco.fr/commentaire/Les%20d%C3%A9penses%20par%20politique%20publique%20en%20Europe%20en%202024 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[9] Ecalle F. (FIPECO), “The Taxation of Wages and Dividends in France and the OECD”, 2024, https://www.fipeco.fr/commentaire/L%27imposition%20des%20salaires%20et%20dividendes%20en%20France%20et%20dans%20l%27OCDE (consulted 09/08/2026).
[10] Observatory on Inequalities, “2021-2024: A Rise in Wealth Income Very Favorable to the Rich”, https://www.inegalites.fr/2021-2024-une-hausse-des-revenus-du-patrimoine-tres-favorable-aux-riches (consulted 09/08/2026).
[11] Bank of France, “Indicators of Wealth Inequality”, Bulletin of the Bank of France no. 250, 2024, https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2024-02/BDF250-6_Comptes.pdf (consulted 09/08/2026).
[12] Norberg J., Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, Atlantic Books/Cato Institute, May 2025, https://www.cato.org/books/peak-human-0 (consulted 09/08/2026).
[13] Dufourcq N., The Social Debt of France, Odile Jacob, October 2025.
[14] Martinot B., Work Is the Solution, 2025.
[15] Aghion P., “Resetting the Innovation Clock: Endogenous Growth through Technological Turnover”, 2025, https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/comptes-rendus/cion-eco/l17cion-eco2526012_compte-rendu.pdf (consulted 09/08/2026).
