You may not know him by name, but you certainly know his work.
If you’ve ever bemoaned this country’s widening income gap; if you’ve ever been to an Occupy protest and loudly proclaimed yourself a member of the 99 percent; if you’ve ever tried to trace with your finger the squiggly graph line depicting the income of this country’s wealthiest elite falling and than rebounding, Grand Canyon-like, across the 20th century; you were almost certainly citing the work of UC Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. A winner of the John Bates Clark medal (the “up and comer” award of the economics profession and about as close as the field gets to a predictor of future Nobel-dom), he has made his brief but high-flying academic career out of diagnosing and prescribing policy solutions to economic lopsidedness here and abroad. In recent years, his stats, graphs, and estimates have become frequently touted by those in search of academically-certified proof that the game is in fact rigged.
But rarely is it Saez who does the touting.
In his outsized influence on the debate over economic inequality, Saez stands alongside the likes of UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and his frequent research collaborator and fellow French countryman,Thomas Piketty. But while Reich, with a recent documentary film credit to his name, is a regular on the commentating media junket, Stiglitz is a prolific writer of layperson-ready economic polemics, and Piketty is the unlikely best-selling author of the widely sold (if somewhat less widely read) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Saez prefers the dignified quiet of the ivory tower.
