Top all-time · #2653
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Gabriel Zucman
Personal blog · gabriel-zucman.eueconomicspolitics
Gabriel Zucman's personal blog at gabriel-zucman.eu covers economics and politics. Since 2014, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “The Distribution of US Wealth, Capital Income and Returns since 1913”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
38mentions?
32HN people?
2014–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- /files/PSZ2017.pdf4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-08-21
- The Distribution of US Wealth, Capital Income and Returns since 19133 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-04-07
- /files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-23
- Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-04-28
- /usdina/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-15
What Hacker News says?
https://www.gabriel-zucman.eu/files/capitalisback/T271 see 1929-1932
Comment linking /files/capitalisback/T271
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted Economics Nobel Laureates' Letter Supporting the California Billionaire Tax [pdf] as a story · 33 points
HN discussionHere you go: https://www.gabriel-zucman.eu/files/capitalisback/T271 Years from 1929 to 1932. Deflation was 12% in 1932, in particular.
Comment linking /files/capitalisback/T271
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> I don't have it literally backwards, because that's not what happens. You do have your Hitler argument completely backward though. Weimar Germany was undergoing runaway _hyper-inflation_, not deflation. That's a common misconception, propagated by people who want the economy to stagnate (goldbugs earlier, crypto bros now). Germany experienced actual _deflation_ in 1929-1932 as a result of the governmental austerit…
Comment linking /files/capitalisback/T271
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted The Distribution of US Wealth, Capital Income and Returns since 1913 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe top 1% of earners today earn a dramatically larger share of total income than the top 1% in the 1950s. If taxes kept up, they would have noticeably higher effective tax rates than they used to have. P.S. The “Tax Foundation” is a right-wing “think tank” (i.e. activists masquerading as researchers) funded by billionaires and corporations. I would however recommend reading the whole paper they cite, http://gabriel…
Comment linking /files/PSZ2017.pdf
on “Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing”Submitted Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income Distribution: Theory and Evidence [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe data they link to is pretty interesting[0]. In [1] there is an interesting chart. On page 578 (next page has the chart the article refers to, this is the table for it) it shows that from 1980-2014 the top 0.001%'s post-tax income growth grew 616%, the top 1%'s grew 194%, top 10%'s 113%, and the middle 40% grew 49% (full population grew 61%). They also compare this to the growth from 1946-1980, where the growth w…
Comment linking /files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf
on “Apple's best product is now privacy”Submitted The Missing Profits of Nations [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGDP is the aggregate of everyone's income, but the highest income earners have a disproportionate share by definition. The lowest tax brackets have never represented a large proportion of government revenue; they both pay lower effective rates and have less income. It's a decent proxy unless you expect that the tax rates paid by the upper middle class (e.g. the top 50% as opposed to the top 1%) have gotten dramatica…
Comment linking /usdina/
on “Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content”Submitted €600B and Counting: Why High-Tax Countries Let Tax Havens Flourish [slides] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey're a drier read than the book, but if you're interested specifically in the data and its analysis, there's a series of journal articles written by Piketty and another economist, Gabriel Zucman, which have more detail than the book does, "Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run" and "Capital is Back: Wealth–Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700-2010". There are preprint PDFs here, along with some other papers on…
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on “Why Inequality Matters”Submitted Wealth and Inheritance in the Long Run as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> What makes me weary about any such tax is that in practice, it seems to target the broad middle class If you're talking about the "Zucman tax" it explicitely targets the ultra-high-net-worth individuals because that's the population that manages to avoid income tax and thus pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of the population. source: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/report-g20.pdf
Comment linking /files/report-g20.pdf
on “Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale”> whenever I hear that all countries are in debt I think of the law of conservation of mass and have an obvious question: who is this monumental, multiple-GDP debt owed to? Finally, someone asking the right questions! The first observation is that if you try to tally "global debt" vs "global assets", a lot of it appears to be missing. This is because the ownership is obscured in tax havens. There's an excellent pape…
Comment linking /files/Zucman2013QJE.pdf
on “The Old Are Eating the Young”I've always wanted to understand the geopolitics of oil and gas. Despite much interested reading, I can never quite figure out what's going on. One of the more interesting quote's I've encountered along the way, "The foreign tax rates of U.S. oil multinationals fell significantly after the first Gulf War, during which the United States intervened to protect Kuwait, a major oil producer. Although it is not possible t…
Comment linking /files/WrightZucman2018.pdf
on “How Iran Uses Bitcoin Mining to Evade Sanctions and “Export” Oil”> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new These are not nitpicks. What you measure drastically changes the results. Piketty and Saez presented their own revision to their data in 2018 that shows starkly different results than the 2013 data everyone cites: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf For exam…
Comment linking /files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf
on “Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality”> Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates Not always. The share of wealth owned by the top 10% in the USA fell between 1932 and 1952, and again between 1962 and 1985 [1]. [1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf#page56
Comment linking /files/SaezZucman2014.pdf
on “America has a monopoly problem”No, the wealth gap is not explained by real estate. The problem is that the 0.01% -- households worth more than ~$100M -- have received almost all the wealth gains since 1980. That's not just real estate -- it has to do with globalization as well as tax and policy decision. So the very rich have gotten much richer, while median incomes (I.e. middle class incomes) have not increased. See Fig 1 of this paper: https://…
Comment linking /files/SaezZucman2014.pdf
on “The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore”What's wrong with computing pre-transfer inequality? His thesis is about how the capitalist market distributes income and wealth. The fact that governments see the need to intervene and redistribute is a symptom of the inequality generated by the market. Regarding your "big theoretical flaws" on intergenerational wealth dynamics, here's an entire chapter by Piketty and Zucman on the subject, confirming that their ce…
Comment linking /files/PikettyZucman2015.pdf
on “Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?”The title and the tone of the OP are a bit inflammatory for my taste, but the data and graphs from the research paper are eye-opening: most economic growth in the US over the past three decades has indeed gone to the top 1%, and particularly to the top 0.01%, leaving everyone else behind.[1] Here's the money shot: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Sc... However, rather than debate the causes…
Comment linking /files/PSZ2017.pdf
on “The rich are hoarding economic growth”Capital gains are considered income. In some jurisdictions they receive special tax treatment, but they are income nonetheless. For example, for the US, they are included in the "Adjusted Gross Income" calculated on a 1040 tax form, but the amount of tax on the income due to capital gains is calculated differently than the tax on wages. If you look at section 3 of the paper (which goes over their methodology), they…
Comment linking /files/PSZ2017.pdf
on “US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%”> One interesting factoid I know is that 50% of Americans represent 2% of the income in America. Reference? This recent study[1] suggests the bottom 50% income represents 12.5% pre-tax, 19.3% post-tax based on 2014 data. [1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf see p. 39, Table I
Comment linking /files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf
on “Living in a parking lot in Santa Barbara”There is a link to it in the article: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/
Comment linking /usdina/
on “Revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners”For the paper: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf I'd like to see coverage of it from a more neutral source.
Comment linking /files/PSZ2016.pdf
on “Revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners”That's not an especially compelling argument. The Top 10% hold more than 77% of the wealth in the United States [1, 2]. And are much more efficient at converting short-term income into long term wealth than the lower 90% [2]. [1] http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf [2] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
Comment linking /files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
on “America’s new aristocracy”In discussions like this the numbers matter. To quote Heinlein, “What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"(1) Piketty's book suffers from poor numbers and bad maths, making his conclusions useless. If he is right, he needs to support it with sound numbers. Chris Giles in The Financial Times found his numbers wanting. (2) I…
Comment linking /files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
on “An Idiot's Guide to Inequality”His most relevant papers (already linked by another commenter) are http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf and especially http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf . More research here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/publications I haven't said anything about clearly and succinctly though; I do not know if that kind of material exist. I believe the book to be a mix of original material,…
Comment linking /files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf
on “Piketty’s Capital in a Nutshell”If you want the "more than a nutshell, but less than a book" version, Piketty & co have two journal articles that cover the main historical data analysis in the book: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf
Comment linking /files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf
on “Piketty’s Capital in a Nutshell”
