# Talking Again With Gabriel Zucman

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman.md
Podcast: [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924)
Published: 2026-07-25T10:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/208396133/493a81af955a1b7c785af0a9dc37cd1a.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/talking-again-with-gabriel-zucman
Duration seconds: 3133

## Resource

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube . In my writing about wealth concentration and oligarchy, I steal a lot from lean heavily on the truly work of Gabriel Zucman, who is a hugely important researcher (winner of the 2023 Clark Medal ) who is also starting to play a major role in policy. I’ve talked to him before, but this seemed like a good time to bring him back. . . . TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Gabriel Zucman (recorded 7/23/26) Paul Krugman : So, hi everyone. Paul Krugman here, bringing back Gabriel Zucman , probably the best guy for thinking about inequality, especially wealth issues. And since I’ve been writing about that and stealing a lot of Gabriel’s research, I thought we should talk again. So, hi Gabriel. Gabriel Zucman : Hi Paul, thanks for having me on. Krugman : Yeah. So, you have been writing—and now I’ve been, you know, cannibalizing it—a lot about wealth concentration. Why don’t you tell us about your reasons for focusing on wealth. Zucman : Basically, because there’s a fundamental tension in democratic societies between extreme wealth and the very possibility of a well-functioning democracy. And it’s not a new idea—don’t get me wrong. All the thinkers of democracy have written about this, all the way back to Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago. Krugman : Right. Zucman : But there was a period of time after World War II when many people thought that this issue belonged to the past. And it corresponded to a very particular moment in history when extreme wealth had largely disappeared after World War II, after the shocks of the first half of the twentieth century. But now, of course, it’s making a dramatic comeback. And so we are back to this discussion of: how do we deal with this tension? How do we organize the…

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## Transcript

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