This, Capital, and Triumph of Injustice are all connected – Piketty was Zucman’s PhD advistor and Saez has done a lot of work with them both.
The books have a lot in common: focusing on income and wealth inequality and tax avoidance. The approaches to economic theory are pretty similar, too.
It’s a kind of economics that I really like. They spent very little time on abstract formulas or theoretical goals. Instead, they focus on data collection and basic arithmetic comparisons, like figuring out how much of Luxembourg’s GDP is driven by pass-through entities set up to do tax evasion?
I think it’s really compelling, understandable, and preferable, for me, to the economics of Naked Economics or Freakonomics or most online pundits, who seem fixated on finding unintuitive, surprising, or risque ways to solve and explain things.
You certainly don’t need to read this book: of the set, Capital affected me the most. Capital is a huge read, though. So Triumph of Injustice is my recommendation for most people. This is more of a niche read. But I really enjoyed learning about how tax ‘avoidance’ really works, and loved Zucman’s fiery discussion of how Luxembourg should be folded into another country because it is almost exclusively used for nefarious financial engineering.