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nobel laureates
2% Wealth Tax on Just 3,000 Billionaires Could Raise $250 Billion a Year: Nobel Economists
"Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible."
Jul 07, 2025
Seven Nobel laureates on Monday published an op-ed advocating for "a minimum tax for the ultrarich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth," in the French newspaper Le Monde.
"They have never been so wealthy and yet contribute very little to the public coffers: From Bernard Arnault to Elon Musk, billionaires have significantly lower tax rates than the average taxpayer," wrote Daron Acemoglu, George Akerlof, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Citing pioneering research from the E.U. Tax Observatory, the renowned economists noted that "ultrawealthy individuals pay around 0% to 0.6% of their wealth in income tax. In a country like the United States, their effective tax rate is around 0.6%, while in a country like France, it is closer to 0.1%."
Although the "ultrawealthy can easily structure their wealth to avoid income tax, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of tax justice," the strategies for doing so differ by region, the experts detailed. Europeans often use family holding companies that are banned in the United States, "which explains why the wealthy are more heavily taxed there than in Europe—though some have still managed to find workarounds."
The good news is that "there is no inevitability here. Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible," argued the economists, who say that taxing the overall wealth of the ultrarich, not just income, is the key.
The wealth tax approach, they wrote, "is effective because it targets all forms of tax optimization, whatever their nature. It is targeted, as it applies only to the wealthiest taxpayers, and only to those among them who engage in tax avoidance."
💡 "One of the most promising avenues is to introduce a minimum tax for the ultra-rich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth."Seven Nobel laureates in economics advocate for the Zucman tax in their latest op-ed.Read the full @lemonde.fr article 👇www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...
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— EU Tax Observatory (@taxobservatory.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 8:05 AM
The anticipated impact would be significant. As the op-ed highlights: "Globally, a 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals. In Europe, around $50 billion could be raised. And by extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly."
That's according to a June 2024 report that French economist and E.U. Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman prepared for the Group of 20's Brazilian presidency—which was followed by G20 leaders' November commitment to taxing the rich and last month's related proposal from the governments of Brazil, South Africa, and Spain.
"The international movement is underway," the economists declared Monday, also pointing to recent developments on the "Zucman tax" in France. The French National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, in February—but the Senate rejected the measure last month.
The economists urged the European country to keep working at it, writing that "at a time of ballooning public deficits and exploding extreme wealth, the French government must seize the initiative approved by the National Assembly. There is no reason to wait for an international agreement to be finalized—on the contrary, France should lead by example, as it has done in the past," when it was the first country to introduce a value-added tax (VAT).
"As for the risk of tax exile, the bill passed by the National Assembly provides that taxpayers would remain subject to the minimum tax for five years after leaving the country," they wrote. "The government could go further and propose extending this period to 10 years, which would likely reduce the risk of expatriation even more."
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Nobel Laureates Join Call for Ramped Up Food Production to Avert Global Hunger Catastrophe
"Today's challenges of access to food will be exacerbated by production challenges tomorrow. We are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close," according to a letter published Tuesday.
Jan 14, 2025
A group of some of the world's foremost thinkers is sounding the alarm on the globe's looming "hunger catastrophe" and are calling for "moonshot" efforts to stave off the crisis, according to an open letter published Tuesday that was signed by 153 winners of the Nobel Prize and World Food Prize.
The luminaries who signed the letter include the economist Joseph Stiglitz; the spiritual leader the 14th Dalai Lama; the Nigerian playwright and political activist Wole Soyinka; and Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who discovered the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.
The letter notes that there are 700 million people worldwide who are currently food insecure and "desperately poor"—and about 50% of them don't know where they can expect their next meal. Some 60 million children under five are cognitively and physically impaired for life from nutritional deficiencies.
As hard as those numbers are to fathom, it's about to get worse, according to the letter. Due to climate change, the world is expected to experience a decrease in the productivity of most major food staples, even though the planet is projected to add another 1.5 billion people to its population by 2050. "For maize, the major staple for much of Africa, the picture is particularly dire with decreasing yields projected for virtually its entire growing area," according to the letter.
Extreme weather and weather events linked to climate change will threaten crop productions, as will additional factors like "soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict, and policies that restrict innovation."
In sum, according to the letter, "today's challenges of access to food will be exacerbated by production challenges tomorrow. We are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close. While much can and needs to be done to improve the flow of food to those in need, food production and accessibility must rise sharply and sustainably by mid-century, particularly where hunger and malnutrition are most severe."
The appeal was coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who is also the outgoing U.S. special envoy for global food security at the State Department. He is also known as the "father" of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
"We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods and economic development. We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today's crisis will become tomorrow's catastrophe," Fowler said in a statement Tuesday.
The efforts the group is calling for include investment and prioritization in agricultural research and development, as well as other potential moonshot initiatives such as enhancing photosynthesis in crops such as wheat and rice, transforming annual to perennial crops, creating nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi, and more.
Mashal Hussain, the incoming president of the World Food Prize Foundation, said in a statement: "If we can put a man on the moon, we can surely rally the funding, resources, and collaboration needed to put enough food on plates here on Earth. With the right support, the scientific community can deliver the breakthroughs to prevent catastrophic food insecurity in the next 25 years."
The letter will be discussed during a Senate Committee event in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.
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Warning of 'Unprecedented Risks,' Scientists Say Mirror Bacteria 'Should Not Be Created'
"Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria could broadly evade many immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants," according to a group of 38 scientists, including multiple Nobel Prize winners.
Dec 13, 2024
Dozens of scientists are calling in no uncertain terms for a halt on research to create "mirror life," particularly "mirror bacteria" that could "pose ecological risks" and possibly cause "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of the plant and animal species, including humans."
The group of 38 scientists, who include Nobel laureates and other experts, addressed research into "mirror life"—mirror-image biological molecules—in a piece of commentary published in the journal Science published Friday, which accompanied a technical report that was released earlier in December.
One of the scientists, synthetic biologist Kate Adamala at the University of Minnesota, was working on creating a mirror cell but "changed track last year" after studying the risks, according to the Guardian.
"We should not be making mirror life," she told the outlet. "We have time for the conversation. And that's what we were trying to do with this paper, to start a global conversation."
To that end, the authors of the commentary plan to convene discussions on the risks of mirror life and related topics in 2025, with the hope that "society at large will take a responsible approach to managing a technology that might pose unprecedented risks."
The ability to create mirror life is likely over a decade away and would require sizable investment and technical progress, meaning the world has the opportunity to "preempt risks before they are realized," according to the scientists.
When broken down into simple terms, mirror life sounds like something out of science fiction. All the biomolecules that constitute life have a "handedness" to them—"right-handed" nucleotides make up DNA and RNA, and proteins are formed from "left-handed" amino acids.
"So when we're talking about mirror-image life, it's kind of like a 'what if' experiment: What if we constructed life with right-handed proteins instead of left-handed proteins? Something that would be very, very similar to natural life, but doesn't exist in nature. We call this mirror-image life or mirror life," explained to Michael Kay, a professor of biochemistry at University of Utah's medical school.
Some scientists like Kay are interested in the medical possibilities of mirror-image therapeutics—which Kay says holds potential for treating chronic illness in a more cost-effective way—but both he and the authors of the recently published commentary are concerned about the potential threats posed by mirror bacteria.
"Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria could broadly evade many immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants. Chiral interactions, which are central to immune recognition and activation in multicellular organisms, would be impaired with mirror bacteria," according to the scientists.
Essentially, as Kay puts it, it’s unlikely that mirror bacteria would be subject to the same constraints as regular bacteria, such as the human immune system or antibiotics.
The scientists warn that further developing this research could open a Pandora's box: "Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created."
The authors argue that scientific research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria should not be allowed, and that potential funders should not support work related to mirror bacteria.
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