The French Economist Who Helped Invent Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax - The New Yorker

Gabriel Zucman and his colleagues are advocating a progressive wealth tax as a solution to global inequality, one that rethinks both evasion and the goals of taxation.

’You know,’ Zucman said, ‘when you have the fall of the U.S.S.R., the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people say it’s the triumph of the free-market economy, the end of history, you won’t do better than that. And, especially now, in a globalized, integrated world, there’s no viable progressive platform that’s possible. And the left became discouraged, as it does—you know, “This is all a messy failure. It’s game over,”’ Zucman said. ‘And now, thirty years later, people are realizing that there are all kinds of contradictions in the way our economies work, and we can do better.’