Gabriel Zucman

No, the wealth gap is not explained by real estate. The problem is that the 0.01% -- households worth more than ~$100M -- have received almost all the wealth gains since 1980. That's not just real estate -- it has to do with globalization as well as tax and policy decision. So the very rich have gotten much richer, while median incomes (I.e. middle class incomes) have not increased. See Fig 1 of this paper: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf

They're a drier read than the book, but if you're interested specifically in the data and its analysis, there's a series of journal articles written by Piketty and another economist, Gabriel Zucman, which have more detail than the book does, "Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run" and "Capital is Back: Wealth–Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700-2010". There are preprint PDFs here, along with some other papers on a similar subject by Zucman & other collaborators: http://gabriel-zucman.eu

> I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation. That's a common misconception, propagated by people who want the economy to stagnate (goldbugs earlier, crypto bros now). Germany experienced actual _deflation_ in 1929-1932 as a result of the governmental austerity. It's exactly what put Hitler in power. Deflation rose up to 12% in 1932! Here's the table: https://www.gabriel-zucman.eu/files/capitalisback/T271 (sidenote, seeing scientific notation on the CPI chart is scary). Hitler then immediately started an expansionist fiscal policy, using state funds to build up the infrastructure and military. This immediately resulted in the GDP growth. > but given that the rich rely on debt so heavily themselves Rich people are not in debt. Their net worth is not negative. That's not the case for poor people. Unlike microeconomics, macroeconomics is pretty simple. The total amount of debt held equals to the total amount of debt owned.

The top 1% of earners today earn a dramatically larger share of total income than the top 1% in the 1950s. If taxes kept up, they would have noticeably higher effective tax rates than they used to have. P.S. The “Tax Foundation” is a right-wing “think tank” (i.e. activists masquerading as researchers) funded by billionaires and corporations. I would however recommend reading the whole paper they cite, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf > Government redistribution made growth more equitable, but only slightly so. After taxes and transfers, income in the bottom quintile stagnated (+4%) over the 1980–2014 period while it grew a meager 21% for the bottom 50% as a whole. That is, transfers erased about a third of the gap between macroeconomic growth (61%) and growth for the bottom half of the distribution (+1% before government intervention). Taxes did not hamper the upsurge of income at the top, which grew almost as much as pre-tax. > The top panel of Figure II provides a granular view of who benefitted (or not) from growth, by showing the annualized real growth of pre-tax and post-tax income for each percentile of the distribution over the 1980–2014 period, with a zoom within the top 1%. There are two striking results. First, the vast majority of the population—from the bottom up to the 87th percentile—experienced less growth than the (modest) macro rate of 1.4% a year. For instance, the 10th percentile declined by 0.6% a year pre-tax (+0.3%…

> whenever I hear that all countries are in debt I think of the law of conservation of mass and have an obvious question: who is this monumental, multiple-GDP debt owed to? Finally, someone asking the right questions! The first observation is that if you try to tally "global debt" vs "global assets", a lot of it appears to be missing. This is because the ownership is obscured in tax havens. There's an excellent paper on this: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/Zucman2013QJE.pdf The second observation is that the 2008 financial crisis put a lot of previously high quality government bonds in jeopardy, and we saw who the major bondholders were: banks. Banks are effectively required to hold bonds as "safe" assets to cover their liabilities. > why are they lending? It looks like either there are people with resources they have no idea how to invest in something actually productive This seems to be basically true, and is why there is so much SV money sloshing around. There's lots of investment that would be societally useful but the returns would not flow back to the original investor, so either it doesn't happen or elaborate schemes need to be constructed to bribe them with future taxpayer cashflow in order to make this investment. > insufficient taxation of the proverbial "top 1%"? Some of whom own more than the GDP of some small countries. And a few who have stolen a good fraction of the GDP of small countries.

In discussions like this the numbers matter. To quote Heinlein, “What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"(1) Piketty's book suffers from poor numbers and bad maths, making his conclusions useless. If he is right, he needs to support it with sound numbers. Chris Giles in The Financial Times found his numbers wanting. (2) In Piketty's response(3), he downplays the importance of the questions, focusing on the European numbers. FOr5 the US numbers, he recommends substituting the numbers of Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman.(4) But those numbers are based on reported capital gains taxes without adjusting for major changes in the law and changes in the definition of capital gains. I don't know if Piketty is right or wrong, but I know his Excel spreadsheets are not adequate evidence. I'd like him to be right; I think wealth disparity in the USA since 1980 is more due to legal maneuvering than merit. I also know my thinking it isn't evidence. 1) http://www.timeenoughforlove.org/Heinlein.htm 2) http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf 3) http://www.voxeu.org/article/factual-response-ft-s-fact-checking 4) http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/global-billionaire-tax-could-… https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/22/eu-funded-report-call… Authors https://gabriel-zucman.eu/bio/ https://www.ipe-berlin.org/en/institute/associate-members/sarah-godar/

I've always wanted to understand the geopolitics of oil and gas. Despite much interested reading, I can never quite figure out what's going on. One of the more interesting quote's I've encountered along the way, "The foreign tax rates of U.S. oil multinationals fell significantly after the first Gulf War, during which the United States intervened to protect Kuwait, a major oil producer. Although it is not possible to know for sure what caused this decline, a possible interpretation of the fall in taxes collected by oil-producing countries is that they reflect a return on military protection granted by the United States to oil-producing States." Figure 2 on page 20 has the discontinuity. https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/WrightZucman2018.pdf

I'm not surprised by the level at the top but I straight-up don't believe the ~7% estimate at the bottom. Poorer people I knew always made significant (for their income) tax free money: tips, under the table, selling stuff, maybe minor dealing, etc. OP is based on a paper[1] which uses and then corrects results from random audits which I wouldn't expect to catch these things. There is some statistical magic called Detection Controlled Estimation done by the IRS that supposedly covers it but I don't know how it works. [1] very nice of them to provide a direct link: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/GLRRZ2021.pdf

http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf - my reply was sufficient, you are just having trouble because it doesn't match with whatever you conclusion you jumped to without data.

The data they link to is pretty interesting[0]. In [1] there is an interesting chart. On page 578 (next page has the chart the article refers to, this is the table for it) it shows that from 1980-2014 the top 0.001%'s post-tax income growth grew 616%, the top 1%'s grew 194%, top 10%'s 113%, and the middle 40% grew 49% (full population grew 61%). They also compare this to the growth from 1946-1980, where the growth was more evenly spread out. The top 10% had growth rates that were multiples of their pre 1980 growth rates, while everyone below the 10% had fractions. [0] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ [1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf

> One interesting factoid I know is that 50% of Americans represent 2% of the income in America. Reference? This recent study[1] suggests the bottom 50% income represents 12.5% pre-tax, 19.3% post-tax based on 2014 data. [1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf see p. 39, Table I

> Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates Not always. The share of wealth owned by the top 10% in the USA fell between 1932 and 1952, and again between 1962 and 1985 [1]. [1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf#page56

Capital gains are considered income. In some jurisdictions they receive special tax treatment, but they are income nonetheless. For example, for the US, they are included in the "Adjusted Gross Income" calculated on a 1040 tax form, but the amount of tax on the income due to capital gains is calculated differently than the tax on wages. If you look at section 3 of the paper (which goes over their methodology), they explicitly talk about capital income: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf

What's wrong with computing pre-transfer inequality? His thesis is about how the capitalist market distributes income and wealth. The fact that governments see the need to intervene and redistribute is a symptom of the inequality generated by the market. Regarding your "big theoretical flaws" on intergenerational wealth dynamics, here's an entire chapter by Piketty and Zucman on the subject, confirming that their central hypothesis holds when taking inheritance into account: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2015.pdf

For the paper: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf I'd like to see coverage of it from a more neutral source.

There is a link to it in the article: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/

That's not an especially compelling argument. The Top 10% hold more than 77% of the wealth in the United States [1, 2]. And are much more efficient at converting short-term income into long term wealth than the lower 90% [2]. [1] http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf [2] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf

The webpage for the paper (!) has more information: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/ There's also a slide deck for a talk on the paper: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf

The study's authors make a few references to age: "While wealth is getting older on aggregate, in the top 0.1% of the distribution wealth is getting younger: the share of top 0.1% wealth held by elderly households is lower in 2012 (39%) than in 1962 (46%). In 1962, top wealth was significantly older than average, while today it is about as old as average. This finding is consistent with the results of Edlund and Kopczuk (2009) showing that there were relatively more widowed women in top wealth groups in the 1960s than in the 1990s." Source: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf, Section 5.3, page 25

GDP is the aggregate of everyone's income, but the highest income earners have a disproportionate share by definition. The lowest tax brackets have never represented a large proportion of government revenue; they both pay lower effective rates and have less income. It's a decent proxy unless you expect that the tax rates paid by the upper middle class (e.g. the top 50% as opposed to the top 1%) have gotten dramatically out of proportion from what they used to be, but that isn't what happened. You can find the raw data here though (Tables II: distributional series, you're looking for tab TG2b): http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ And then you can see that the highest effective income tax rate ever paid by the top 1% was 23.4% in 2001. The most current number from that table was 2019 when it was 20.3%. Whereas the highest rate from the mid-20th century period when they were alleged to have been paying such high income tax rates was 21% in 1945. In 1953, when the US had its highest marginal tax rates (92%), the effective income tax rate on the top 1% was 14%. Which is more typical for the period; 1945 was an outlier, it being the height of WWII. The thing that has actually come down is not effective income tax rates on the top 1%, it's corporate income tax, which is a consequence of globalization. "Corporate income tax" is not a good fit for an international supply chain because tax avoidance and jurisdiction shopping is too easy if you're trying to tax something that only…

> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new These are not nitpicks. What you measure drastically changes the results. Piketty and Saez presented their own revision to their data in 2018 that shows starkly different results than the 2013 data everyone cites: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf For example figure 3 shows that when you account for tax transfers, the bottom 50%’s share of income is only a few points lower than in 1960, though significantly lower than the peak of about 25% in 1970. It also shows that, contrary to common assertions, the bottom 50% income has grown consistently since 1960 adjusted for inflation. Figure 1 shows that the labor share of income has been flat since 1940 when you account for benefits. (Put another way, capital’s share of income is flat.) The data about returns to capital are particularly important. Supporters of wealth taxes and capital taxes tend to point to rising inequality as the justification for such approaches. But if the returns to capital aren’t increasing as a fraction of the economy, that argument gets harder. Of course there may be other arguments in favor of such taxes, but those seem less well developed. The point the Economist article makes well is that inequality is hard to measure, and the simple definition used by Piketty and Saez’s initial analysis is inadequate. For example, there is a whole school…

The title and the tone of the OP are a bit inflammatory for my taste, but the data and graphs from the research paper are eye-opening: most economic growth in the US over the past three decades has indeed gone to the top 1%, and particularly to the top 0.01%, leaving everyone else behind.[1] Here's the money shot: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Screenshot_2… However, rather than debate the causes of this divergence, or accuse "the rich" of anything, we should instead be coming up with WORKABLE SOLUTIONS for increasing the income -- and therefore the spending power -- of the masses in a sustainable manner. I imagine a tremendous amount of pent-up consumer demand would be unleashed, because THE MORE THE MASSES EARN, THE MORE THEY SPEND ON PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, including those created by entrepreneurs. [1] Here's the paper: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf

His most relevant papers (already linked by another commenter) are http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf and especially http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf. More research here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/publications I haven't said anything about clearly and succinctly though; I do not know if that kind of material exist. I believe the book to be a mix of original material, existing research (as linked above), and most of all the fruit of many years of productive research on these topics. You are of course free to not buy Piketty's thesis based on his book alone; however, to convincingly build your case to convince others, it looks like you may have to absorb a fairly considerable body of knowledge. On a more personal note -- while I am an economist by training (doctorate obtained in early 2010s in a top 10 uni), my field was quite far from Piketty's, so I am not in a position to know with any confidence whether he's right or wrong. (I would say though that his position certainly has merit and deserves the attention it is getting.) That being said, I maintain that Taleb shows himself as disconcertingly naive and frankly quite condescending to think that he can dismiss years of research in a few witty disparaging paragraphs. (Possibly without reading the book, almost certainly without reading the research, and very definitely without looking at the raw data.)

I happened to read this interesting paper this morning: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/Zucman2013QJE.pdf Now I can't vouch 100% for its validity but he makes some very interesting points. Most notably: the biggest shelter countries --- those that allow masking of ownership but also freely invest in other investment vehicles based in countries with their own rules that make it easier to mask the source of investments. It's a many-layered onion: The paper suggests that - Switzerland is the biggest location for accounts that purchase these investment vehicles. - Luxembourg and Caymen Islands are the biggest centers for these investment vehicle funds: e.g. hedge funds and mutual funds which sell their equities to the Swiss-based money. Most interestingly: If you ask Switzerland where the money in their accounts comes from, they of course will not tell you. HOWEVER they do publish aggregate stats on a per-country-of-origin basis. Guess which countries are the source of most of the Swiss tax haven investments? - Panama and others. Are Panamanians the new global super-rich? Of course not. It's another layer in the onion, and it makes it almost impossible to figure out where the source money is. And Panama doesn't publish anything about its source money. One can intuit, however, that the only folks who have something to gain from masking through so many layers are tax evaders. If these were Saudis or others, why would they care? The scale of the wealth is difficult to…