Triumph of Injustice
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Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice is a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists who revolutionised the study of inequality, demonstrate how the super-rich pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. In crystalline prose they dissect the deliberate choices and the sins of indecision that have fuelled this trend: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax-avoidance industry and, most critically, tax competition between nations.
It is not too late to change course. Instead of competition, we could choose cooperation, finding ways to create a tax regime that serves universal, democratic ends. The Triumph of Injustice offers a visionary and practical reinvention of taxes for that globalised world.
Emmanuel Saez is professor of economics and director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on tax policy and inequality from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. With Thomas Piketty, he has constructed long-run historical series of income inequality in the United States that have been widely discussed in public debate. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1999. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 2009 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His research analyzes the accumulation and distribution of wealth through global and historical perspectives. He received his PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics in 2013. He was awarded the Bernácer Prize in 2018 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019. He is the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, which has been translated into eighteen languages.