Gabriel Zucman

It's the power to buy elections.

It's the power to influence policymaking.

And so an extreme concentration of wealth always means an extreme concentration of power.

And this is a tension that's really fundamental in our democratic societies.

All the thinkers of democracy

have written about that from Aristotle to someone like Lea Yipi today at the London School of Economics.

I think those drivers have played some role, but they are not the most important ones in my view.

What's been really essential is two things.

One is the general shift towards more pro-capital policies.

After World War II, you had a number of regulations, whether it's of the financial industry or whether it's of the real estate market, like rent caps or rent regulation.

You had all sorts of relatively anti-capital policies and relatively pro-labor policies, and unions were powerful and so on.

And then there was a shift that started in 1980s in the opposite direction.

So that's financial deregulation, that's the massive changes in taxation.

Yeah, pretty much, yes.

You could call it that way.

And what's been key in those changes, in this broad set of changes, is what has happened to taxation.

Because taxation is really at the heart of the explosion of the wealth of the super rich.

Why?

Because what we've discovered recently is that billionaires essentially pay almost no income tax.

That's the reality today.