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The cover of The Triumph of Injustice

The Triumph of Injustice

Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, 2019

Two economists trace how the US tax system stopped taxing the rich, then lay out a concrete plan, from a wealth tax to a national income tax, to reverse it.

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10 parts, about 22 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Shows that once every tax is counted, the American system is nearly flat, and four hundred very wealthy Americans pay a lower rate than workers
  • Explains how multinationals shift paper profits to havens, and proposes a minimum tax by country and sanctions on holdouts
  • Proposes a wealth tax, a flat national income tax and a public bureau to police tax avoidance products

Who it is for

  • Readers asking who really pays taxes in America
  • Voters and students weighing tax reform proposals
  • Readers interested in inequality and corporate tax havens

What the summary covers

  1. Reinventing Fiscal Democracy2 min
  2. A Giant Flat Tax2 min
  3. How Progressive Taxation Was Won, and Lost2 min
  4. The Triumph of Injustice: Avoidance since 19803 min
  5. Welcome to Bermuland2 min
  6. The Spiral: Capital versus Labor2 min
  7. Our Plan to Stop the Spiral2 min
  8. Taxing the Rich: A Wealth Tax as the Third Leg3 min
  9. Beyond Laffer: Shrinking the Very Top2 min
  10. A World of Possibility: Our National Income Tax2 min

Recommended by

  • Thomas PikettyFrench economist, author of Capital in the Twenty First Century
  • David LeonhardtNew York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner
    [T]he most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time.

About the authors

  • Emmanuel SaezMacArthur Fellow and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley
    • Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality; PhD in economics from MIT in 1999.
    • His research focuses on inequality and tax policy.
    • With Thomas Piketty he created the top income share series showing the sharp rise of US inequality since 1980.
    • Assistant professor at Harvard from 1999 to 2002, then professor at Berkeley.
    • Won the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 2009 and a Harvard honorary degree in 2019.
    • Wrote The Triumph of Injustice with his Berkeley colleague Gabriel Zucman; it tells how US progressive taxation was dismantled and how to rebuild it.
  • Gabriel ZucmanFrench American economist who studies tax havens
    • Professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure PSL, and founding director of the International Tax Observatory.
    • Born in Paris in 1986.
    • His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Thomas Piketty, asked whether the wealthy left France because of its wealth tax.
    • Took his PhD in 2013, taught at the London School of Economics, joined the Berkeley faculty in 2015 and moved to the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure in 2023.
    • Developed methods to measure the wealth held in tax havens, in a series of papers and in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations.
    • Proposed an internationally coordinated minimum tax on ultra high net worth individuals, set out in a report commissioned from him by the G20 in 2024.
    • Received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2023.
    • The Triumph of Injustice, written with Emmanuel Saez, analyses the progressivity of the US tax system across all taxes at all levels of government since 1913.

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