Gabriel Zucman

I'm Gabriel Zachman.

I'm a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California in Berkeley.

And I'm also the director of the International Tax Observatory.

We do research on inequality and taxation with a focus on the super rich, multinational companies, tax avoidance, and how we can fix those problems.

These are some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Especially the explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the most dramatic evolution of the world economy of the last decades.

It started in the 1980s.

accelerated after the financial crisis of 2008, 2009.

And now there's an acceleration of the acceleration over the last couple of years.

If you look at the wealth of global billionaires, it has increased by 40% in just two years, coming on top of everything that had happened before.

And with the explosion of their wealth, there's an explosion of their influence.

There's an explosion of their power.

And we're seeing it everywhere.

And a lot, frankly, of what's happening in our democracies is downstream of this explosion of billionaire influence.

And so it's frankly, it's difficult to study anything else than that at the moment.

I really think it's the main economic and political issue of our time.

Hence a lot of our work these days is about that.

When I grew up in Paris, I did my studies in France and then I got a job in the US.

And so I moved to the US and I lived in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 10 years.

I moved when I was 26.