Gabriel Zuckman

Whereas in actual fact, as you show, actually most of the rich don't.

in terms of the top income deaths, I'll say, do pay a high level of tax.

They pay a lot of tax, much as the rest of the income distribution do.

What we're talking about here, or what you're talking about here, is not, say, the top 10%, or necessarily even the top 1%.

We're talking about the top 0.01%.

Well, I was going to ask you, how many people are we talking about here?

Yeah, well, as you point out in your book, and again, I think this is something that is not talked about enough.

I mean, two things have added to that, right?

One is we see massive programs of quantitative easing, money printing effectively for central banks around the world after 2008 that inflates asset prices.

These people get even richer.

And as you say, the tax problem.

makes the problem worse, because while the rest of us are paying large amounts of taxes or a large proportion of our taxes in the income, these people are not paying much or, if anything, in terms of taxation on their income, so that allows them to accumulate more wealth and more wealth and more wealth, and it's a self-perpetuating problem.

Yes, well put.

Well, it feels a lot more, doesn't it, like the world of, say, the 1890s or the 1910s, sort of Gilded Age, rather than the post-war years, as you've alluded to, when, as you say, as a result of the Second World War and these massive welfare states which come along and redistributive states, you know, you have extreme wealth which is, you know, relatively curtailed.

But the early, late 19th, early 20th century world is more similar to the world we're in now.

Well, I mean, you say in the books, and the quote that really struck me on this theme, which said, nobody knows the exact concentration of wealth at which the kind of plutocratic collapse we have seen in history becomes inevitable.

The point of no return is anyone's guess.

What do you mean by that, the point of no return?

Well, let me put two counter-arguments to you that I know you're familiar with.

One is, and you've already alluded to it, we are talking by your own admission of a very small