The latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek discusses a new book aimed at the Thomas Piketty crowd, Gabriel Zucman’s The Hidden Wealth of Nations.
With his book, “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” Zucman is positioning himself as this year’s Piketty, whose opus renewed a debate about inequality last year. Both titles play off economics classics — one by Karl Marx, the other Adam Smith — and the new book resembles the cover of Piketty’s. It also features the French economist’s name on the cover not once but twice. Piketty, who supervised Zucman’s doctorate degree, also wrote the forward.
“The Hidden Wealth of Nations” is capitalizing on the U.S. political season, hitting the shelves just as presidential candidates as diverse as Jeb Bush, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders attack the tax breaks exploited by the ultra-wealthy.
“Almost nobody in economics is talking about tax havens,” Zucman said in an interview. “People haven’t really made the link between tax evasion and rising inequality. They see big companies and the very wealthy avoiding taxes, but they don’t understand how this is part of this dramatic increase in inequality. My hope is to bring more attention to this.”
One hopes that Zucman is not as wrong about tax havens as Piketty has been about income inequality.
