Ben Steverman - The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich
The minimum
amount Zucman calculated the wealthy stash in offshore accounts: $7.6 trillion
The tools Zucman has identified to date
challenge a series of assumptions, fiercely held by many economists and
policymakers, about how the world works: That unfettered globalization is a
win-win proposition. That low taxes stimulate growth. That billionaires, and
the superprofitable companies they found, are proof capitalism works. For
Zucman, the evidence suggests otherwise. And without taking action, he argues,
we risk an economic and political backlash far more destabilizing than the
financial crisis that sparked his work.
Gabriel Zucman started
his first real job the Monday after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Fresh from
the Paris School of Economics, where he’d studied with a professor named Thomas
Piketty, Zucman had lined up an internship at Exane, the French brokerage firm. He joined a team writing
commentary for clients and was given a task that felt absurd: Explain the
shattering of the global economy. “Nobody knew what was going on,” he recalls.
At that moment, Zucman
was also pondering whether to pursue a doctorate. He was already skeptical of
mainstream economics. Now the dismal science looked more than ever like a batch
of elaborate theories that had no relevance outside academia. But one day, as
the crisis rolled on, he encountered data showing billions of dollars moving
into and out of big economies and smaller ones such as Bermuda, the Cayman
Islands, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He’d never seen studies of these flows
before. “Surely if I spend enough time I can understand what the story behind
it is,” he remembers thinking. “We economists can be a little bit useful.”
A decade later,
Zucman, 32, is an assistant professor at the University of California at
Berkeley and the world’s foremost expert on where the wealthy hide their money.
His doctoral thesis, advised by Piketty, exposed trillions of dollars’ worth of
tax evasion by the global rich. For his most influential work, he teamed up
with his Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez, a fellow Frenchman and Piketty
collaborator. Their 2016 paper, “Wealth
Inequality in the United States Since 1913,” distilled a century of data to
answer one of modern capitalism’s murkiest mysteries: How rich are the rich in
the world’s wealthiest nation? The answer - far richer than previously
imagined - thrust the pair deep into the American debate over inequality. Zucman and Saez’s
latest estimates show that the top 0.1% of taxpayers—about 170,000 families in
a country of 330 million people—control 20% of American wealth, the highest
share since 1929. The top 1% control 39% of U.S. wealth, and the bottom 90%
have only 26%. The bottom half of Americans combined have a negative net worth.... read more:
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