France can’t stop talking about Gabriel Zucman — and his wealth tax

“The merit of the Zucman tax is not the tax itself, it is the diagnosis and moving away from the idea that nothing can be done,” said Pascal Saint-Amans, a French official who for a decade led the push for global corporate taxation reform at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

Zucmania 

More than a decade after Thomas Piketty’s wildly successful “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Zucman is taking the crown of France’s next rock-star economist. 

His work on wealth taxes helped inspire left-wing presidential candidates in the United States, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and netted him the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in 2023. Last year, he advised Brazil as it sought to push forward a global minimum tax on billionaires when the country presided over the G20.

Zucman, who teaches alongside Piketty at the Paris School of Economics as well as the University of California, Berkeley, has proven to be a master communicator willing to spar on social media or in in-person debates, which are many.

LVMH chief Bernard Arnault said the tax would “destroy the French economy.” Other influential economists argue the measure would only bring in €5 billion, not the €20 billion Zucman says. Legal experts worry it’s unconstitutional. 

Then there’s the capital flight argument: that billionaires would simply leave France to avoid paying the tax, as Pierre-Édouard Stérin did, depriving French coffers of significant revenue. A body of independent economists advising the French government, however, found that such an exodus would not have a significant economic impact, punching a small hole in that argument.