The Unseen Threat of Capital Mobility

Marshall Steinbaum

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
By Gabriel Zucman
University of Chicago Press, $20 (cloth)

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
By Gabriel Zucman
University of Chicago Press, $20 (cloth)

Two new books link rising inequality to unseen forces: tax havens in economist Gabriel Zucman’s case, and overseas labor and environmental exploitation in historian Erik Loomis’s. The adverse consequences of the free movement of capital suffuse both narratives. Loomis recognizes that the threat of offshored jobs and outsourced supply chains is wielded to discipline the domestic workforce in the United States, and Zucman points out that tax havens have effectively allowed the wealthy to choose their own tax system and regulatory regime. They each question received wisdom and ideologically charged models in which “globalization” is an inexorable force innocent of politics or power, which operates to either universal benefit or at worst whose ill effects can be compensated. In fact, thanks to globalization, the economic body—what its ideological affiliates call “The Market”—is able to transcend the national body politic, to the benefit of multinational corporations and the wealthy individuals who own them.