Gabriel Zucman

What mattered for them was to understand the long-run tendencies and how income is distributed between land owners, workers, and so on.

And so that's how economics used to be.

There was this parenthesis during the Cold War

And after the end of the Cold War, inequality started very gradually, and it's been way too slow, but to make a comeback at the center of the economics discipline.

And you mentioned Tony Atkinson, who played an incredibly important role in all of that, who was one of the first one.

A British economist who was a professor at Oxford and who was instrumental in reviving

Yeah, Inequality, his last book, exactly, very important.

And instrumental in reviving the study of the long run trends in income and wealth concentration.

And he's been an inspirational figure.

For me, I've known him.

when I was doing my PhD in Paris.

I met with him numerous times.

And more broadly, he was continuing a tradition that I feel very much a part of, which is this tradition of

empirical social sciences, which was so strong in England, in the UK for a long time, like the inventors, for instance, of the national accounts, which are the GDP statistics, the way we quantify economic activity.

These are British economists of the 17th century, Gregory King, William Petty, and they were interested not only in measuring the economy as a whole but also in inequality.

You know, the first attempt at measuring national income, you know, by the famous social table

of Gregory King, he tries to estimate the total income of England, but also the income of each social class.

Like, you know, the kings, the baronets, you know, the workers and so on and so on.

And there is this long tradition that started in the 17th century that has continued over time.

Tony Atkinson was, you know, a great part of this tradition and that I'm trying at a very modest level to continue myself with a focus on