People in Economics: Scourge of the Rich

Gabriel Zucman is a strong advocate for higher taxes on the most affluent.

He is one of the world’s leading experts on measuring incomes and wealth, and on how to tax very rich people and corporations.

The blueprint for the G20 proposal for a global minimum tax was drawn up by a still-young French economist.

“We have to fix the mistakes we’ve made in taxing the superrich, not simply throw up our hands and give them a free pass,” he says.

Gabriel Zucman has found that 90 percent of offshore wealth belonged to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.

Zucmann ’s work has also found that the rich evade taxes much more than conventional audits suggest.

In Scandinavian countries, the top 0.01 percent evade about 25 percent of their taxes, compared with 5 percent identified by audits.

In 2019 , two US Treasury economists claimed that income share of the country’s top 1 percent had not changed much since the 1960s .

The dispute centers on assumptions about how to allocate “unobserved” income.

Zucman and his coauthors have defended their assumptions, arguing that it is the Treasury authors who “erroneously allocate a large and growing amount of untaxed business and capital income to the bottom of the distribution” Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote an op-ed claiming that the revenue estimates were greatly exaggerated.