财税茶座

经济学人： T wo new   books argue for doing away with the rich. Not in the Pol Pot sense of murdering them all, for the writers—a Dutch professor of ethics and the director of a left-wing British think-tank—are impeccably nice. Rather, they favour policies that would make it impossible to have “too much” money. 有两本新书主张废除富人。不是波尔布特意义上的谋杀他们所有人，因为作家——一位荷兰伦理学教授和一家英国左翼智囊团的负责人——都无可挑剔。相反，他们赞成那些不可能拥有 “太多” 资金的政策。 How much is too much? Ingrid Robeyns of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the author of “Limitarianism”, thinks the state should prevent anyone from accumulating more than $10m (or pounds, or euros; it is a rough figure). In addition to this hard “political limit”, she thinks there should be a much lower “ethical limit”. In countries where the state pays for health care and pensions, no one should amass more than $1m in savings, and society should scorn anyone who does. 多少才算太多？荷兰乌得勒支大学的英格丽德 · 罗宾斯（Ingrid Robeyns）是《限制主义》（Limitarianism）一书的作者，她认为国家应该阻止任何人积累超过 1000 万美元（或英镑或欧元; 这是一个粗略的数字）。除了这

经济学人： Working out who earns what is surprisingly tricky. Both the very rich, who sometimes try to keep their wealth from the taxman, and the very poor, who are sometimes mistrustful of clipboard-wielding officials, are especially hard to pin down. Nevertheless, before the covid-19 pandemic, household surveys consistently found a fall in the number of people living in poverty. The World Bank counted 659m living on less than $2.15 a day in 2019, down from around 2bn in 1990. 弄清楚谁赚多少钱是非常棘手的。无论是非常富有的人（有时试图向税务员隐瞒自己的财富）还是非常贫穷的人（有时不信任挥舞着剪贴板的官员），都特别难以确定。然而，在 covid-19 大流行之前，家庭调查一致发现贫困人口数量有所下降。世界银行估计，2019 年有 6.59 亿人每天生活费不足 2.15 美元，低于 1990 年的约 20 亿。 Yet this progress came at a cost: a global “precariat” emerged, members of which were barely out of poverty and perilously exposed to shocks, while the top 1% got rich faster. That, at least, is the received wisdom. The World Inequality Database, a project associated with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, two economists, combines tax data with other