Gabriel Zucman

And it, you know, it kind of radicalized me because in the San Francisco Bay Area, you have the wealthiest people in the world.

You have the tech billionaires living nearby

close to thousands tens of thousands of homeless people in San Francisco in Berkeley everywhere so tremendous gigantic inequality and I was also there when Trump got elected in 2016 and I witnessed first firsthand like the the failure of the Democratic Party to

address the phenomenal increase in inequality in the U.S.

to propose

concrete, practical, and ambitious solutions to that problem.

And so it led me first to kind of study inequality, especially in the US, but also from a global perspective, like, you know, spend all my time and energy doing that, but also progressively to try to think about, okay, you know, how should we fight it?

It's good, it's important to study.

And, you know, it all starts with that, you know, creating clarity.

transparency, making objective the situation that exists today, it's already starting to change things a little bit.

But then more recently, I kind of try to do more actionable policy work.

So hence the book on how we should tax, why we need to tax billionaires, of course, but more importantly,

What can we learn from the historical experience, from the international experience and the lessons we can draw to effectively tax the billionaires today in a way that will really work?

Yeah, and I think what you describe is spot on.

I do think there is also some progress that's being made because, look, for a period of time, let's say after World War II, from the post-war years until the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of economics was essentially about just efficiency.

You know, the debate of the time was really about whether

the market economy or the planned economy is the most efficient.

And inequality, distributional questions, nobody cared about those issues at the time.

But it was a kind of parenthesis because economics originally, if you look at economics as it was practiced in the 19th century, if you look at the kind of

the classical economists of the time, whether it's Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Smith, they were all very much interested in distributional questions.