Gabriel Zucman

But once you've found facts about the magnitude of tax evasion,

about the effective tax rates of the different groups of the population, how much the rich pay in tax relative to the middle class.

These are some of the most important elements of information for our democracy.

And so for me, first of all, it's part of the job to make sure that everybody knows about those facts, that this knowledge belongs to society and not just to a tiny group of experts, number one.

Number two, for me, it's also part of the job

to propose solutions when problems have been found.

And today there is a major anomaly in our societies, which is that the super rich pay much less tax relative to their income than the rest of the population.

And we'll come back to that.

But once you've found problems, I think it's part of the job to say, OK, look, how can we fix that?

Yeah, not with a technocratic approach, which I very much dislike, which would be like the experts have demonstrated that you need to do X. And if you disagree with that, it means you're populist or whatever.

No, no, no, not at all.

But to offer solutions to to feed

a vibrant public conversation, a public debate.

It's for people, it's for citizens to decide through democratic deliberation and the vote.

But where researchers like myself can contribute is by saying, okay, there is this problem and here is a potential solution.

Now we can have a, you know, there are always trade-offs, pros and cons, we can discuss that.

But here is one way to do things.

Maybe we didn't, we might have not thought of it exactly in those terms before.

But here's a potential solution.

And of course, if you propose solutions, I think it's also part of the job to try to defend those proposals, because it's not enough to say, well, I think we can...