Wealth, Power, and Democracy with Prize-Winning Economist Gabriel Zucman
He has been called "the billionaires' nightmare," "the archenemy of tax havens," "the wealth detective," and "a rockstar economist." He has advised presidential candidates and is one of the world's leading experts on wealth, inequality, and tax evasion. But Gabriel Zuckman describes himself more humbly: "I'm someone who likes to explain how things work."
At Arts & Culture on Wednesday, July 1, at 7 p.m., Professor Zucman will explain the rise in billionaires' wealth, the explosion of their power, the consequences for democracy, and possible remedies to inequality and its consequences. In particular, he will focus on a billionaire tax, like the one proposed in California that is expected to be on our ballots in November.
Tickets for Professor Zucman's talk, available on Eventbrite, are $5 for club members and students and $10 for non-members.
In 2023, the American Economic Association awarded Professor Zucman the John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious honor given to the economist under forty who has made the most significant contribution to the field - an award often seen as a precursor to the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Professor Zucman's research not only impresses economists but also drives global conversation and political action. In an influential 2024 report commissioned by the G20, he argued for a coordinated 2% global minimum tax on the wealth - note that's wealth, not income - of the world's 3,000 billionaires. He said the measure would end the current situation in which the world's ultra wealthy avoid paying taxes by shielding their income in shell companies or offshore trusts.
Before Professor Zucman studied these tax-avoidance practices, the trillions of dollars hidden in offshore tax havens were a proverbial black box. He developed a forensic accounting method to track global assets and liabilities to find what he calls "missing" money. He discovered that about 8% of the world's household financial wealth is held in tax havens.
Professor Zucman is the author of the landmark The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens and is the co-author, with Emanuel Saez, of The Triumph of Injustice, which showed, for the first time, that the wealthiest billionaires in America paid a lower percent of their income in taxes than did people in the middle class. His new book, We Need to Tax Billionaires, is due out in August.
He earned his doctorate in economics in 2013, from both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics. His Ph.D dissertation, under the supervision of famed economist Thomas Piketty, explored whether France's wealth tax was driving rich French citizens to leave the country. He taught at the London School of Economics before he joined Berkeley's economics department in 2015, and the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure in 2023. He is the founding director of the PSE Stone center on Global Wealth Dynamics and also the founding director of the EU Tax Observatory, an independent research laboratory that studies tax evasion and avoidance in the European Union.
Fortunately for us, Professor Zucman; his wife Claire, a labor economist; and their three children spend their summers in Berkeley. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from this exciting young economist.
