Gabriel Zucman: tackling inequality

[Celerity]

Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, discusses with Henning Meyer, Social Europe editor-in-chief, the implications of his new book with Emmanuel Saez: The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.

The Triumph of Injustice review – how to wrest control from multinationals

This bracing treatise by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman advocates a radical approach to reducing inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/the-triumph-injustice-emmanuel-saez-gabriel-zucman-review

The global economy crashed more than a decade ago and the world’s progressives are still grasping for an answer. Thinkers from the political left should have been at the forefront of the debate about reforming the world’s financial system, but instead have spent much of the last 10 years struggling to tame the more vigorous response to the crisis from the right. There have been imaginative initiatives, particularly with regard to the exchange of financial information between countries, but these have hardly set the public imagination alight. Too much of the answer to this global system failure has come from policy rather than politics.

And this has allowed frauds, fools and fanatics to dominate the debate, claiming to speak for globalisation’s victims, but acting instead in the interests of its biggest winners. Whatever the question, their answers are the same: fewer taxes, fewer regulations and smaller budgets. In this, the left is partly a victim of its own previous successes. The era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton promised downside-free government: economic growth for the good of everyone; intense relaxation about the filthy rich; light touch regulation of the banks and social spending with the proceeds. The apparent success of this approach ensured both the Labour party and the Democrats lacked new ideas once the economy collapsed, there was no money left and it became apparent that their political houses had been built on sand.

Since then, a small group of economists has been analysing the structure of the globalised economy to build the foundations for a new approach to organising our societies; doing for our world what John Maynard Keynes did 80 years ago. Foremost among them is Thomas Piketty, whose monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a sensation when published in 2014. But his fellow travellers have been doing equally valuable work (and in mercifully shorter books), such as this latest study, The Triumph of Injustice.

Written by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who, like Piketty, are French but who work at the University of California, it analyses how the super-rich dodge taxes, what this means and what to do about it. In an age when the primary instinct of many left-leaning people is to yearn for a time machine, it is a bracing and brave formulation of a radical new approach to public funding. They not only argue that the wealthy should pay higher taxes, but dismiss the whole logic of the third way. Theirs is a cogent, reasoned and practical argument against the “tax competition” that has sent so many corporate profits to Ireland or Bermuda and they give clear and compelling policy solutions to change the direction of society itself.

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The Triumph of Injustice : How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

https://www.bookdepository.com/Triumph-Injustice-Emmanuel-Saez/9781324002727?ref=grid-view&qid=1584734216481&sr=1-1