When Integrity Gets in the Way

                                             

                    When Integrity Gets in the Way




A new profile of Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in the New York Times contained a fascinating revelation about the ongoing academic reception of their work, summarized in AEIR. Late last year, Zucman was being courted for a faculty appointment by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Although the department voted to approve the hire, Harvard’s president and provost vetoed the decision. According to the Times, this was “partly over fears that Mr. Zucman’s research could not support the arguments he was making in the political arena.”

The issue with Zucman’s work revolves around a stunning statistical claim that he made last fall. According to his own proprietary calculations, the overall effective tax rate paid by the ultra-rich in the United States had dipped below that paid by the bottom 50 percent of earners for the first time in 2018.

Zucman released these statistics to journalists with much fanfare, where they were quickly trumpeted as “fact” by outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post to bolster Elizabeth Warren’s wealth-tax proposal. In reality, Zucman’s numbers had not even undergone scholarly peer review, as is the norm for work in the economic arena.

The weeks that followed their release also revealed something far worse than failing to adequately vet this seemingly stunning empirical claim.

Instead of objectively reporting the latest findings from tax statistics, Zucman was placing his finger on the scale. He appeared to be bending his results to conform to the political narrative of Warren’s campaign, which he was also advising at the time. Through a series of highly opaque and empirically suspect adjustments, Zucman had artificially inflated the tax rate paid by the poorest earners while simultaneously suppressing the tax rate paid by the rich.

Whereas Zucman now claimed to show the ultra-wealthy paid just slightly north of 20 percent of their earnings in taxes, the most recently available year of his previously published numbers (2014) places the rate at 41 percent.

Harvard’s administration, to its credit, recognized this inappropriate breach of scholarly standards and exercised a rare but necessary check upon their ongoing erosion in the academy. Naturally, that has left other activist academics and journalists who support his claims for political rather than scientific reasons in a fit of rage.