Gabriel Zucman: the Piketty-trained "wealth detective" who catalogued the secret fortunes of the super-rich and figured out how to tax them

Bloomberg's Ben Steverman offers a long and exciting profile of Gabriel Zucman (previously), a protege of Thomas Piketty (Zucman was one of the researchers on Piketty's blockbuster Capital in the 21st Century) who has gone on to a career at UC Berkeley, where he's done incredibly innovative blockbuster work of his own, particularly on estimating the true scale of the wealth gap in the USA and worldwide.

Zucman's research on wealth inequality formed the evidentiary basis for Bernie Sanders's 2016 election campaign, and his later work on modeling responses to wealth taxes and crafting of wealth-tax legislation that blocks loopholes has been the basis of Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax (Zucman also created an online wealth tax simulator that allows skeptics to check his reasoning about the likely returns from and responses to such a tax (I am a donor to the presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren).

Zucman connects inequality with the rise of far-right demogoguery: America's world-leading love-affair with "lower taxes on the wealthy, weaker labor protections, lax antitrust enforcement, runaway education and health-care costs, and a stagnant minimum wage" have "further enriched the rich" and "incentivized greed" (recall Gordon Gecko's summing up of the ideology as "Greed is good"). This leads to "political capture" and a chaotic scramble to survive in a game of musical chairs where there are fewer and fewer chairs and they cost a lot more to get hold of.

Zucman and his colleague Emmanuel Saez have co-authored a forthcoming book on the subject, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, that sounds fantastic. Read the rest