Practical implementation and future outlook

Okay, we have got a real treat for you today. We have an interview with the person who I believe is the most important economist in the world today. I'm not just saying that, I really believe it. Uh, this guy is the world leader in in inityequal in the taxation of the super rich. I really think this guy is the guy to show to the Labour Party or whoever is in charge in your country that wealth taxes are not just some radical out there idea for like lefty tree hugging hippies. Academics believe in this, the work is being done, the design work is being done on how specifically how to tax the rich. I really want to show him to you know the political class, people like Rory Stewart on the rest is politics who who has been asking where are the academics, where are the professors, if you want to see the academics, the professors, this is the guy. So Rory Stewart, get him on your show, you're gonna get on with him like a house on fire. This is the guy we're missing, I think. The guy who really does the work. He's he's just had his recent book translated into English. It's called We Need to Tax Billionaires. It's a short book, it's not expensive, and it's quick to read and it's the it's the missing link in my opinion. The actual how do we do it, the specifics on how do we do it. So excited to introduce you to the most important economist in the world, Gabriel Zuckman . Okay, welcome Gabriel Zuckman to the United Kingdom. Thank you very much for coming, for visiting my wonderful kitchen. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all of your work across the years on inequality on wealth tax es and thanks for writing this book, getting it translated into English. Do you have, I don't know if you have this phrase in France, we we have it in English. You wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once. Do you have a similar phrase in French? No? No, not really. Well I feel a little bit like this meeting you because the first time we met was two weeks ago in in Paris when I went there for the promotion of the French translation of my book. Now we're meeting again for the first time in the UK. But do you remember, you probably don't remember, do you remember roughly when the first time I ever got in touch with you by email was ? Perhaps five, six years ago? I looked it up before this interview. It was the 22nd of May 2015. So exactly 11 years ago. And I read it, it was a kind of embarrassingly embarrassingly long email. You were probably too busy to read it, but you very kindly replied. And then over the eleven years since then, uh a number of times I've reached out to you for help, for advice, where should I go to university, house try to study economic s, um, and you apply it every time. So thank you very much for all of your help across the years. Um and I've been following your work very, very closely and you're obviously very well known in France now, the work you're doing now, but obviously we're in England now, and a lot of our viewers maybe won't know who you are. So, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? I'm Gero Zachman, I'm a professor of economics at the Paris School of Ec onomics and the University of California in Berkeley. And I'm also the director of the International Tax Observatory. We do research on inequality and taxation with a focus on the super rich, multinational companies, tax avoidance and how we can fix those problems. These are some of the most pressing issues of our time. Especially the explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the most dramatic evolution of the world economy of the last decades. It started in the nineteen eighties, it accelerated after the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and now there's an acceleration of the acceleration. Over the last couple of years, if you look at the wealth of global billionaires, it has increased by 40% in just two years, coming on top of everything that had happened before. And with the explosion of their wealth, there's an explosion of their influence. There's an explosion of their power. And we are seeing it everywhere. And a lot, frankly, are what's happening in our democra cies is downstream of this explosion of billionaire influence. And so it's frankly it's difficult to uh study anything else than that at the moment. I really think it's this the main econom ic and political issue of our time. Hence a lot of our work these days is about that. Well people who watch this channel know I couldn't agree more. Obviously it's something I'm very passionate about. I'm quite interested in understanding. So I studied economics. I went to London School of Economics. Uh, we're about similar age, so I went there 2005 to 2008. Then more recently, I went to Oxford and did a master's. I'm interested in how you end ed up studying economics and also studying inequality because from my experience of economics actually at universities there's not a lot of discussion of inequality. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about where you're from, what was like what was life like growing up and how you ended up studying economics. Well I grew up in Paris, I did my studies in in France and then uh I got a job in the US. And so I moved to the US and I lived in uh Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 10 years. Okay. How old were you when you were living in San Francisco Bay? I moved when I was 2 6x um and uh it you know it kind of radicalized me because in the San Francisco Bay Area you have the wealthiest people in the world you have the tech billionaires living nearby uh close to uh thousands tens of thousands of homeless people in San Francisco in Berkeley everywhere so tremendous gigantic inequality. And um I was also there when uh uh uh uh Trump got elected in twenty sixteen and I I witnessed first first hand like the the the the the failure of the Democratic Party to address the phenomenal increase in inequality in the US, to propose concrete, practical and ambitious solutions to that problem. And so it led me first to kind of study inequality, especially in the US, but also from a global perspective, like you know, spend all my time and energy doing that, but also progressively to try to think about okay you know how should we fight it it's good it's important to study and you know it all starts with that you know creating clar ity transparency making objective the the situation that exists today. It's already starting to change you know things a little bit, but then more recently uh I I I I kind of try to do more actionable uh policy work. So hence the book on how we should tax. Why we need to tax billionaires, of course, but more importantly, what can we learn from the historical experience, from the international experience uh and the lessons we can draw to effectively uh tax the billionaires today in a way that would really work. I'm really interested in this move you've made from academia into like basically actively trying to fight inequality because it's not an easy move to make. I want to talk a little bit about that, but before I get onto that, I just want to know a little bit about what it was like for you within academia working on and trying to work on inequality because so I did a master's at Oxford 2017 to 2019, and uh I went there with basically the intention of working on inequality. Um, they had one guy there who worked on inequality, I think it was Tony Atkinson. He died before I went there, he was about like 85 or something, and then there was nobody in the entire Oxford economics department working on inequality. I tried my best to choose subjects that are about inequality, I couldn't find a single one. I wrote my thesis about inequality, I couldn't find a supervisor, I had to go outside of the department. And when I was there, the general consensus was you will not be able to succeed as an academic in academic economics if you choose inequality as your focus. So that was my experience, but you know you I I'm aware I've been in academia much longer than me. Have things changed? Did you experience anything like that? How how do you think academic economics is now with regards to being able to seriously look at inequality. Yeah and I think what you describe is is spot on. I do think there is also s some progress that's being made because look for for a period of time, let's say uh after World War II, from the post-war years until uh the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of economics was essentially about just efficiency. You know, the debate of the time was really about whether the market economy or the planned economy is the the m most efficient. And uh inequality distributional questions, you know, nobody cared about those issues at the time. But it was a kind of parenthesis because economics originally if you look at economics as it was practiced in the 19th century, if you look at the kind of the classical economist ofs the time, whether it's Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Smith, you know, they were all very much interested in distributional questions. You know, what mattered for them was to understand the tender the long-run tendencies and how income is distributed between landowners, 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 economies, British economists, who was a professor at Oxford and who was instrumental in reviving the study. I've got his book over there. You can probably in their shelf, Inequality. His last book, exactly. Very important. And really instrumental in reviving the the the study of the long-run trends in income and wealth. concentration And it's been an inspirational uh figure uh for me. I've known him uh uh when I was doing my PhD in Paris, you know, I I I met with him numerous times and more broadly, you know he was continuing a tradition that I feel very much a part of with which is this tradition of empirical social sciences. Yeah with which is database. Yeah, exactly. You know, which uh was so strong in in 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 uh economists of the 17th century, uh, 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 uh 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 uh workers and so on and so on. And uh there is this long tradition that started in the 17th century, uh, that has continued over time. Tony Atkinson was you know a great uh uh uh part of this tradition, and that I'm trying at a very modest level to continue uh myself with a focus on um uh international economic relations. That's what mostly I'm interested in. And you know billionaires, to be honest, it's not my passion. I think it's you know, as I said, very important to study them given everything that's happening. But deep down, most of my work has been more about the organiz ation of international economic relations and how this changes over time and the dynamics of coordination or competition across countries, the consequences this has for inequality and so on. So just very quickly, because I want to get onto your political work, um, we often get messaged by young people who wanna study economics and they want to study inequality specifically? That's something I struggled with. Just very quickly, what advice would you have for maybe young people here in the UK or in other countries that are thinking about studying economics university and want to focus on inequality. I found that difficult. Have you got any advice for how people can go about doing that? Where they should study, what they should do. Yeah, I mean do it. And and and uh be the change you want to see. That's my advice. And we need more people uh studying uh inequality within uh academia. And you know, it's been some progress thanks to people like Tony Atkinson, but the the movement needs to to to grow and so it's on all of us to contribute to that. And I think this is the direction that we're taking. It's too slow, but this is where we're going as a discipline. Well, I mean, just for me personally, the work that you know you yourself have done and the work that Thomas Spaghetti has done was uh Thomas Paghetti, of course, another very well-known French economist who he's worked a lot with. Um it really inspired me. I think Thomas Piquetti's big book, Capital, came out I think in 2012, when I was still working as a trader for Citibank. That's what is in the bookshelf next to Atkinson's Inequality book in that nice cover. Um and before I read that book, I didn't know that any economists were seriously looking at inequality. So you know the work that he's done and the work that that you've done and Emmanuel Sayers, you know, a group of French economists was really inspirational for me. So thank you for that. And you know, send my thanks to Piquetti. I know you speak to him a lot. But I want to get onto your political work because you've made this big shift, which to me is super interesting because I don't see many, I mean in a sense it's a shift that I've made as well, but I don't see many people who are sort of top-level academics who've decided, you know what, and correct me if you don't think this is a correct description of what you've been doing. But it seems to me like you've really decided I'm gonna really shift my focus into not just you know writing papers and getting prestigious positions on this. I'm gonna try and to to do something about you know your book is called We Need to Tax Billionaires which is quite political. Um like why did you decide you know I'm gonna you know you you have a very good record in economic s. You could very easily have just written a couple of you know op-eds in newspapers and had a few rounds of applause. But from what I've seen of your work, you know, you've got a big presence on social media, you know, you're making videos on Instagram, you've got something like 300,000 followers on Instagram. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, I suspect that's maybe not what you imagined your life going in that direction a number of years ago. Why did you make this big shift into like and and also, you know, you have become very well known in France. That the the form of taxation on the super rich which is popular in France is known as the Zuckmann tax, which is your name, your your face. Um I would guess you've sacrificed a lot of you know your your your privacy for this. You know, what what made you decide to take this like hard turn and really try to become like aggressively politically active. Well for me it's um it's part of the job of uh being a researcher in the social sciences. Meaning there are different intellectual traditions right in the social sciences, but the tradition I feel closest to is that is is the tradition in which the reason why we study society is not just because it exists, you know, like stars in the sky, but it's to contribute at a very modest level to uh improving policies and to improving society. And so it all starts with kind of research and establishing facts and understanding the problems. But to me, it seems that once you've understood those problems, when when you've established facts, once you've created knowledge, it's part of the job, first of all, to contribute to disseminating that knowledge uh in the broader population. Okay. Of course, it would be much more comfortable for me to just you know stay in the ivory tower and just have seminars with my peers and you know a small group of experts. 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 democracies. 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 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, okay, 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 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 uh 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 we might have not thought of it exactly in those terms befor e, 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 propos als. You know, because you know it's not enough to say, well, I think we can tax billionaires like that and then you know to log off and not answer any questions. No no no. I think it's also part of the job to explain, well okay, sure. You know, there are potential questions and problems, but here are the here are the answers. And so for me it's really a natural part of the job of what it means to be uh a researcher in the social sciences. Not not everybody in the field agrees with that view. Some people think that you know they should not be involved in public conversation and this should be two like separate spheres. But that's no, no, that's not how I view uh how I view all of that. Has it been difficult for you personally? Okay people watching from outside France might not be aware that you are like really quite well known in France, and that I guess that's happened quite quickly. Like, has it as you I I I don't know, I suppose you're quite a private person naturally. Yes. Has it been difficult this like sudden transition into being quite well known in a country where're where you live, where you from well uh there are there are you know positive and less positive aspects to it. So let's say so it's true that you know for my scenes this tax proposal has come to be known as the Zigman Tax, which was not you know something not your idea. Clearly not. Okay. What's the the positive side to it? The positive side is that uh it it it forces everybody to try to understand what this is about. It's a new proposal. It's a new idea. It's not just for instance w France used to have a wealth tax for a very long time. And it's not recreating the wealth tax. You know, it's something else. So it has a new name, so everybody has to try to make an effort. Sometimes the uh opponents of the measure didn't make that effort to try to understand what this is about the difference is that the Zuckman tax is attempt correct me if I'm wrong, is attempting to be really tightly focused on making sure it is really the very rich, the richest people pay it, the richest people don't avoid it. Is that correct? Yes, so that different elements. So first of all , uh it's uh most importantly, it's about creating a new principle. The principle is that if you are extremely wealthy, and we can debate what it means, but I've proposed owning more than a hundred million dollars in wealth, if you're extremely wealthy, you have to pay an unavoidable minimum amount of tax each and every year. Okay, so you know it's it's trivial. You might say, well, surely this must be s already somewhere in our laws, except it's not. Yeah. So we need to create this principle that you know you can't pay zero. And today some of those billionaires they pay zero. You had revelations a few years ago by the US media, ProPublica on the taxes paid by US billionaires, and you saw people like Elon Musk, Jack Bezos.. Paying zero tax Jeff Bezos receives a check, a tax credit for his children. So that's just wrong. Yeah. Everybody agrees with that. So there has to be a floor. So you so first of all, yeah. The floor. So that that so everybody understands the the proposal. There has to be a minimum. Now And this is on the basis that at the moment these people are paying less in percentage terms than cleaners and taxi drivers and hairdressers and teachers. So there has to be a minimum. Then for the minimum to be effective, it has to be expressed not as a fraction of income. Okay. Because the whole problem is that those billionaires they manage to report no income, like Jack Bezos, right? Yeah, yeah. In a technical sense. Of course that in a real sense they have income. From the perspective of the tax law, they manage to pretend they're redefining their income as as as CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos didn't pay himself a wage, as controlling shareholder of Amazon he instructed the company not to distribute dividends he didn't sell shares and so he didn't realize capital gains and so his taxable income was truly zero and of course there's no tax evasion. This company's making enormous profits, but none of them and he owns the company. And he owns the company. Essentially all the money stays in this bucket. None of it comes to this bucket, so officially I have no income. Exactly. So his true economic income is enormous. Is very large, he's in the billions, his wealth is gigantic, but he paid no income tax. And that's legal and that's the way the system works. But of course it's not a good way. It's not a good system. So we need to create a minimum. For the minimum to be effective it has to be ex pressed not as a fraction of taxable income but as a fraction of wealth. Which is because that's the only way to make it to make it unavoidable. To manipulate. Because they can technically reduce their income to zero, but of course they cannot reduce technically their wealth design. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's the basic idea. So uh minimum expressed as a fraction of wealth, then if you choose a rate of two percent on wealth, not a high rate, it's the rate that would ensure that the billionaires would pay as much tax, all tax included, relative to their income, than the rest of the population. That's how the rate was computed. So basically it all starts from all the you know a body of work, international research effort that was done over the last five, six years, that has established that the billionaires, the super rich have much lower effective tax rates, all tax included, than the rest of the population. Especially in particular, and that's the main reason, because of the failure of the income tax to effectively tax them. Okay, so if you want to correct this anomaly , you need something, a minimum tax that's based on wealth. And so that's the proposal. And with two percent, you know, it's really low, two percent. There are many reasons why you might want to have higher tax rates than that on the super regions personally I would favor much higher rates than that let's be clear i i worked with bernie sanders for instance in the us when he was running for president on his tax program , he was proposing rates of up to 8% on wealth for people with more than $10 billion in wealth. You know, all of that makes a lot of sense. But my thinking here was, okay, how can we uh design something that everybody should agree on you know it's it's just not possible to defend the notion that billionaires should be allowed to pay less tax than the rest of the population. It's just a blatant violation of our most basic principles of equality before the law, which are at the core of our democracies. So we should all be able to agree at least on that. And that that was a proposal. And origin ally it was uh uh form ulated in 202 4 when Brazil had the presidency of the G twenty and they wanted to put on the agenda of the G twenty some new ideas for international cooperation. And in 2021 there had been a minimum tax on multinational companies that had been agreed on by 130 countries. And so I thought, well, okay, you know, we let's try to do for billionaires what we've been able to do in a very limited manner, but still it exists for multinational company. So the idea of a minimum tax , let's do it, let's try to do it for billionaires. And then the Brazilian government said, let's do it. Great idea. And so they kind of they put it on the agenda of the G20. Now these G twenty finance ministers, they meet several times a year. Not once since the creation of the G twenty, twenty-five years ago, not once had they discussed those questions of taxation. Taxation of the very age, the the boom in extreme wealth, which are some of the most important, frankly, issues of our time. And so the the fact that for the first time they were forced to talk about that, it kind of kickstarted the conversation in different countries. And so that's why then the French National Assembly picked up that proposal. Like exactly what the what I I had formulated in my report to the G20 in June 2024 was then translated into a bill that was passed by the French National Assembly in February of twenty ninety-five, minimum tax of two percent of wealth for people with more than a hundred million euros. And uh it was passed by the French National. It passed. It passed National Assembly, which is, you know, it's not a left-wing parliament. Far from it. It passed. And then okay, it was blocked by the Senate. Yeah. And so it's still not enacted into law. But it's going to come back and eventually uh I'm I'm very confident that it it will end up passing because it's the current situation which is just radical. So you and unacceptable. You think you will get it in France? You think you will get the wealth tax to it? Well, I'm sh pretty certain that it will happen in France and more than that I think how long do you think it will take it? It will happen in other countries and eventually it it will be I think the most likely scenario is that i it will become it will happen a bit like the uh the creation of the progressive income tax happened at the beginning of the twentieth century. So it was an international movement. You know, for centuries the way that we did taxation was uh extremely unfair. It was taxes were only based on consumption. Things like salt, you know, and commodities. And so it was a heavy burden for the poor. And the rich didn't have to pay taxes, etc. And so then there is this revolution, beginning of 20th centuries, where different countries say, no, no, look, we are going to have a progressive income tax with higher rates for higher incomes. The UK actually was a leader because it happened in 1909 with the famous people's budget of Lloyd George, where in 1909 uh Lloyd George says, Okay, we're going to introduce a progressive income tax. There was already an income tax in the UK, but at a flat rate, same rate for everybody since 1843. And in 1909, people's budget, there's a 2.5% super tax on top of the regular income tax that's introduced for the ten thousand wealthiest people in in the UK. And that's the birth of the progressive income tax. And France did the same in nineteen fourteen, the US did the same in nineteen thirteen. Many countries kind of did it at roughly the same time. It was not an international agreement, but it was just a common realization that we need more money for pen for workers' pensions, you know, for many things. And the way we do things at the moment, it's totally unfair. And so we need to make sure that the rich pay their fair share. And so and then the income tax became much more progressive over the course of the 20th century. And my feeling is that something a bit like that will happen. Will happen. And it's starting to have to happen. Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize. And support doesn't need to feel awkward. With Med Express, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by U K registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Yeah, are you are you familiar much with the conversation in in this country about wealth taxes? Yes. Because I'd like to speak about it a little bit. I think when you say that you know you see the wealth tax as similar to the income tax. I think that's for me that's super interesting. When I was writing my book, I was reading Hard Times by Charles Dickens. And they're talking at the time about taxing the factory owners. And the factory owners say, oh, it's impossible. If you tax us, we'll throw the factories into the sea. So I think if you look at history, like it shows, of course rich people are gonna fight against this. Um and rich people in this country are fighting against this. That's good. Um I was discussed. Do you know what do you know what the rest is politics is? Yes. Um it's the biggest politics show in uh politicss podcast in this country. I've been telling them aggressively that if they're serious on the economy, they should have you on, and they definitely should. But they mentioned me in their show last night and they said people like Gary Stevenson just want to take money from the rich and give it to the poor. What do you think about that argument? Uh f I think uh first of all, um wha what what's truly a radical is the current situation where the super rich can live in their own parallel society tax-free even though their wealth is a social creation is a is a is a collective success. You don't become a billionaire by your own, right? You've benefited from education, from healthcare, from all the public infrastructure that has made it possible for your businesses to thrive, uh, the law cour thatts protect your properties and so on and so on and so you know uh it's it you know wealth creation is always a social uh creation. They benefit from subsidies oftentimes. And the notion that you can become extremely rich thank thanks to the collaboration of millions of people and then have no duty whatsoever towards society is just you know totally radical. So that's the current situation and that's what we need to fix. And let me just emphasize that even though we could suspect that the super rich were not paying their fair share, and you had you know revelations, I mentioned you know ProPublica in the US until recently there was just no hard data. And a lot of the work of work collecting this data. So you you are convinced inequality is increasing. And it's not a and it's not easy work because there's a tremendous, tremendous opacity about the super rich. There's no public official statistics about their wealth, about their income, about the taxes that they pay. And it's only by working in partnership with stats administrations in different countries that we were able to establish the facts. We have about ten countries now where we see everywhere that the same pattern, you know, whether it's France, whether it's the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Norway, Sweden , everywhere. The working class, the middle class pays a lot of tax. Yeah. Rough all taxes included, roughly forty, fifty percent of their income, in VAT , in payroll taxes, in property tax es, income tax, all included, forty, fifty percent. And then the billionaires they pay like twenty, twenty-five percent of their income, you know, only half as much as the rest of the population. We didn't know that five years ago. Now that's established fact. So that's the first kind of novelty. Telling people about this new international research effort and what we've learned from that. And then it comes in addition to answer your question to the kind of the gigantic increase in uh in wealth inequality and especially in the wealth of the super rich, including in the UK. Let me just mention the numbers for the UK because you know I don't think that people necessarily have that well in mind . If you look at uh the the Sunday Times uh richless richless. It exists since 1989 . In 1989 , uh the top 0.001% of the wealth distribution, so that's roughly the 200 wealthiest families, they owned in wealth the equivalent of five percent of the UK's GDP. Meaning if they spent all their wealth, they could buy, they could have bought the equivalent of five percent of all the goods and services that are produced in a given year in in the entire country. Recently they just released their latest numbers, their latest ranking, and now that same group of the population owns the equivalent of twenty five percent of GDP in wealth. Meaning two you have two hundred families. If they spent all their wealth, they could buy a quarter of everything that's produced in a given year in this country. You're convinced inequality is a is increasing aggressively. Well when you look at those numbers, you know it's pretty you know difficult to to to claim that it's it's not rising. But then you know people sometimes argue no inequality is not increasing a lot because they look at other parts of the population. If you look at the top 10% as a whole, but here we're talking about the super range real quick. So the real problem is that top the very very top end. I'm not saying it's the the only problem, but it's where the the the trend has been the most powerful, the most spectacular and also the most worrying for democ for democracies. Because you might say okay, this who cares about these 200 people. Well, you know, you you look at uh the media they own, you look at their influence on politics, on policies. You know, look, wealth for most people is is it's a good thing, right? For the middle class, it's uh it's owning a home, it's pensions for your old days, it's safety in case shocks happen, you lose your job. It's great. We like to encourage wealth accumulation by the middle class. For the working class, they don't have access to property. Not yet. You know, the working class, the bottom fifty percent of the distribution, almost owns no wealth. Their debts are about as high as their assets. We'd like to encourage access you know, we'd like the working class to have access to wealth. Okay, so we want to encourage wealth accumulation in general. Now for the super rich, wealth is not you know not accumulating billions for their old days, right? For them, wealth is power. It's the power to influence the prevailing ide ology, is the power to influence markets by buying competitors, is the power to influence politics by buying elections, by influencing policy making. And there is always uh a fundament al tension in democratic societies between the concentration of wealth on the one hand and extreme extreme wealth in particular and the very possibility of a democratic society. They've written about that. So you think democracy is in threat? You think if we don't tax the the very, very rich, this small group of society will amass more and more and more wealth and power and it will take wealth and power away from ordinary people. That's but that's exactly what's happening, right? It's it's this kind of loop where wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. Yes. And and uh uh look at what's happening uh in the US with frankly the the plutocratic collapse you think just yesterday like the the the the uh government announced that uh uh Trump had signed a deal with the IRS according to which he he and his family would be shielded from any tax audit for the rest of their life. Because Trump had sued the IRS because his tax return had been disclosed and he was asking ten billion dollars from the agency that he controls as president and you know they settled on okay let's make a deal you're not going to have to pay me ten billion yeah but from now on you're forbidden from just auditing my tax returns or those of my children. You know, look the the degree not only of corruption but the total you know oligarchic capture of the government. And and r you have to also realize how fast it can happen. Because sometimes people look at the US and they're like, oh no , whatever happens there cannot happen here. But no no, first it's a global trend. It can happen very fast. I've experienced it firsthand in France, like you know, the two percent minimum tax proposal, like you know, minimalistic. Everybody should be in favor. 86% of the population is in favor. And the billionaires, when it came very close to passing uh a few months ago, they used all the media that they own and they own 85% of the private press. They own all the economic newspapers of the country except one, and they used it to stoke fears and to predict all sorts of catastrophes and more importantly to essentially threaten elected representatives to blackmail them, but essentially saying look, if you vote for that, they didn't say that as explicitly, but that was really the substance of the message. If you vote for that bill, for that proposal, we will fight you with all our weapons and all our money. I'm gonna have to push you for some quick answers on the UK political situation because I know we're short of time. Here in the UK, there is a very real possibility that we will get a new Prime Minister. Maybe as soon as in the next couple of months, but um if not, quite possibly in the next year and a half. A new Prime Minister is going to come in. The current government is very unpopular. The new Prime Minister will have to have an issue-a- an answer on what they're going to do with the economy. We have been pushing very hard for a number of years now that we think the UK government should be more serious about the taxation of the super rich. If the new Prime Minister was willing to do something more serious on the top end . Is it practically possible and would you be willing to support the new Prime Minister in designing and implementing those taxes such that they work for the UK economy? Yes and yes, 100%. So is it practical ? A lot of the work that we've done over the last few years has been to study the historical experience with wealth taxation in many countries like France, Germany, used to have wealth taxes and abolished in many cases their wealth taxes. And what's important to understand is that those wealth taxes, they really didn't work very well. That is true. And that's often an argument that you hear from opponents of wealth taxation. They said, oh, it's been tried in the past and it failed. I agree with that part of the statement. That's correct. They were really poorly done. But there are two ways to look at that experience. You can say, well, we've tried in the past, it didn't work, hence it will never work. End of story. We can't do anything. We have to accept that the super rich live in their own parallel society, tax-free. There's not not much that we can do. That's one way to look at it. The other way is to say, okay, let's try to learn about history. Let's try to learn about the mistakes that were made and draw lessons and see if there are solutions. And there are solutions. And so the two key ingredients you need to make a tax based on wealth for the super rich work well in practice are the following. Number one, you need to make sure that there is no way to avoid the tax. And tax avoidance , it's not a law of nature, it's man-made. It's when lawmakers introduce in the law exemp tions or deductions. And all the wealth taxes that existed in Europe, they were written in that way. Like France, it's totally crazy. It's a story I tell in the book. In France, the socialist party, the socialist party comes in to power in 1981, they create a wealth tax, and then immediately they change it to exempt the billionaires from the wealth tax. And of course, they don't go on TV and say, look, we're going to exempt the billionaires, and also they they invent a little story. They say that it's very important to protect business assets from the wealth tax because otherwise we're going to harm businesses. And they define proficient professional assets, that's how they call it. And they define professional assets, you know, that exist nowshere in any economics textbook, so they invent this notion, and they define professional assets as owning more than 25% of the shares of a company. So if you're really rich, you own a lot of shares in a big business , then all of that was exempted from the wealth tax. That's what they put in the law, right? But it's totally crazy. You know, it's it's like if the US was creating a wealth tax today and and was exempting Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos from the Web. That's what the French socialists did in 1981. But importantly, everybody understands that we can write the law differently, right? So the idea behind the proposal is let's start really high in the wealth distribution. So only people who have more than 100 million pounds will be affected by the tax. But in exchange for this very high threshold, no exemption, no deduction whatsoever. Everybody understands that if you at you are at that level of wealth and we're talking about uh a hundred uh one thousand families roughly in the UK, that you have a high ability to pay taxes. And so you don't need any kind of exemption whatsoe ver. Now if you write things like that, it's already a huge progress relative to the past wealth taxes. So that's number one. The second crucial ingredient is how do you deal with the threat of migration. You know, rich people always the debate boils down to okay, perhaps it would be good to tackle super rich, but they're going to move. They're going to move to Dubai, to Monaco and we can't do anything. This is wrong. It's wrong that it it's not wrong that they will move, surely some of them will. No those flows tend to be exaggerated in the public debate, but it's not zero. But what is wrong is this idea that we are powerless to curb this tax exile. We are not powerless because any country on its own, let's take the UK, could say the following. It could say, look , if someone has lived for a long time in the UK, number one, and number two has become extremely rich in the UK. And now number three moves to another country, that's their right, fine, but we the UK, we will keep taxing that person as if he or she was still a resident of the UK for five years or ten years we can discuss. Okay, and any country on its own can do that. So that there would be no incentive anymore for the super rich to move for tax reasons. And so then you might say, well, it's it's impossible, it's never been done. Well, no. That's what the US does. The US is even more extreme than that. The US says if you as if you have US citizenship and you move to another country, you have to pay taxes to the US until you die. Yeah . That's somewhat extreme, right? Because okay, imagine someone who was born in the US, has US citizenship, their parents moved when they were two months old, then and then that person never sets foot again in the US. In principle, that person has to pay taxes in the US until she dies. Well that's somewhat extreme. But what the UK and what all other countries do is the opposite extreme. Because what we do at the moment is we let people who have spent all their life in the UK, who have become immensely rich in the UK, we let them go tax free as soon as they move, as soon as they leave. You know, on January 1st. It's totally And it's not it's it's not essential. We don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. We could say okay look you want to go to Dubai, go to Dubai. But from a tax perspective you will still be treated as a resident of the U K for 10 years, let's say. Quick one. Last one. So while you're here, I really want to get you, I really want to get the political classes in the UK to to see you and hear you because the argument for the wealth tax and wealth taxes here in the UK is very loud, very popular with the public, but many of the political classes view it as unrealistic. And the rest is politics, which is the biggest politics podcast in this country, Rory Stewart, one of the presenters, said that pushed back on the idea that there is any, he said there is no academic consensus. He said, where are the academics? Where are the people with postgraduate degrees? Where are the professors ? So what do you say to Rory Stewart, the presenter of the biggest politics podcast in the country about the idea that no academics support this and would you be willing to go on the rest of politics and show them that there are academics who support this. Yeah I I I say to Rory Stewart that he should uh uh read a bit more uh and uh listen a bit more to what 's happening uh in the rest of the world and he would uh realize very quickly that there is in fact overwhelming support even among academic economists, of course in the general population, but more importantly uh for your question among economists for this proposal. Like for instance in July of 2025, there was an op ed in Le Monde that was signed by seven Nobel Prize winners. Seven Nobel Prize winners. Okay. Who wrote Okay We support this pro it was exactly about this proposal. And two percent minimum tax on the super rich two percent of their wealth and the supported France doing it on its own don't wait for an international agreement lead by example, do it. And you know, they explain the logic, you know, the failure of our tax system today to effectively tax the super rich, why that's the right approach to fixing that problem. Seven Nobel Prize winners, you know, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Esther Duflo, Darren Asimoglou, many others . Then in the debate in France , you had uh other economies, many economies who came out strongly in support. Like for instance the, former chief economist of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, you know, we wrote uh an op ed together in Le Monde saying and he said that's the right proposal, do it. You know, he's not he's not a left-wing person, he's not a communist. And so, you know, broadly speaking, you have about 80%, 90% of the population, which is in favor , and you have broadly the same proportion among economists. You know you always have ten, twenty percent of the population who thinks that um it's normal for some people to be above the law. That the super rich, they're so kind of uh smart and and and so good and that it's a kind of natural aristocracy and that we have to accept that they pay less tax than the rest of us and in any case there's nothing we can do about fixing that, uh and that the law should be more lenient on the on the powerful and and harsher on the poor and immigrants. But it's all always a small fraction of the population. Most of the population everywhere wants equality before the law. And that's true for people, just like for economists. And fundamentally this taxation of the wealth of the extremely wealthy, it's about that. It's about this fundamental principle that you cannot have uh you cannot live in your in in your own separate society. You have to abide by our fundamental principle of equality before the law. You have to pay at least as much as nurses and school teachers. It's just not acceptable that you should be able to pay zero. And you would be willing to go on the rest of politics and explain that to them? Of course I'd be. Because you know, I I'd love for you to go on there and I I I really think this is the the big economic issue of our time and I think uh any serious political podcast, you know, you are the world leader on this, I think they should be speaking to you. Um I can see we're out of time. Have you got one final message to the British public and the Australians and Americans and you New Zealands might be watching. Yeah, I mean now's the time. Frankly, we are the the beginning of an international movement where you have this proposal, these questions that are discussed in different countries. We need one country to lead by example, to step ahead and say, you know what? We have public finance problems, we have investment needs, we need to invest in education, in healthcare, in our public infrastructure, which is at the core of our collective prosperity. And we are going to do that first by taxing the super rich. It's not going to be enough but it's necessary. And you know what what's going to happen? If one country does that, it will demonstrate that you can get a lot of revenue. the For UK, we're talking about fifteen billion pounds per year from just taxing at two percent the wealth of the super rich. And the sun is going to keep rising in the morning. Okay? And and then once one country does it , many ma many countries very fast will will stop doing it. And that's how you create this international movement. So you you know, it could be often it can be you and often uh the UK has led. You know, the UK was one of the first country to create a progressive income tax in 1909. The UK was the first country to create a welfare state in 1945. So now's the time to lead again. Okay, well I hope it is. So thank you very much for your time . Gabriel's new book, We Need Sax Billionaires, is just out now. It's very short and it's very easy to read. I read it on one flight. Like this is just giving you all the details basically