Gabriel Zucman

speaker

485 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Gabriel Zucman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 197. The Billionaire Tax Debate (Gabriel Zucman) · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

But it's also not negligible.

And I think many people are approaching those debates with a somewhat outdated view.

dating back to 1980s, 1990s, prior to the explosion of extreme wealth.

And the prevailing view at the time was like, okay, perhaps the billionaires don't pay a lot of tax, but they are so few in number that it doesn't really matter from a public finance perspective.

And that you might have been true at the time, but today it's just not true anymore.

Because the flip side of the explosion of the wealth of the super rich is that now you have this big tax base of 25% of GDP.

And for comparison,

Look, Keir Starmer famously tried to get 1.5 billion pounds by scrapping fuel allowances for retirees.

1.5 billion.

Here we're talking 10 times more money, 15 billion, from just roughly 1,000 families.

who pay very low tax today because it's only applying to not only those who are extremely wealthy, but those among the super rich who avoid taxation today.

So it's the fairest and the most targeted tax that you can think of.

I want to be very clear about the fact that it's not a 2% tax on billionaire wealth that's going to be remotely enough to reduce the concentration of wealth and hence the concentration of power.

The 2% tax, the proposal in the book, it addresses another problem.

It addresses this...

tax injustice issue.

But it's not fixing this other problem, which is in many ways a bigger problem, which is that with the explosion of the wealth of billionaires, we've had an explosion of their power, the power to influence markets, the power to influence the prevailing ideology by buying media companies, the power to buy elections, to influence policymaking, and so on.

And there is always

a fundamental tension in democratic societies between extreme wealth on the one hand and the very possibility of a well-functioning democracy on the other hand.

It's a very serious problem that all the thinkers of democracy have written about all the way back to Aristotle, to someone like Lea Yeepee at the London School of Economics today.

Showing 321–340 of 485 · page 17 of 25