Commissioner Ana María Archila, Mayor's Office of International Affairs: Thank you so much, Professor Brumberg. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Thank you all for making the choice to be here today. Today is Tax Day. I hope you either filed your taxes or your form to extend your taxes. But today is Tax Day, and a lot of people around the country are thinking about what is happening with their money. Where is their money going? Who's paying and who's not paying? And how come, if we are all pulling our resources, how come so many of us are feeling so squeezed? How come so many of us are having such a hard time paying the rent and affording childcare and groceries and so much more? And that question is a question that is not just on the minds of people in this city, of people in this country, but it's actually on the minds of people everywhere around the world.
This conversation today is a conversation about what it takes to actually address the growing, urgent, global crisis of extreme inequality. And I know it's a conversation that matters to everyone around the world because today we have in this room representatives of more than 40 countries. I'm especially thankful to the diplomats who are joining us today from the United Nations, from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and representatives from missions and consulates of more than 40 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Oceania. Your excellencies, thank you so much for joining us today.
Your presence here reflects something that we know, which is that around the world, people are struggling. Most people - millions, billions of people - are struggling while wealth and ease and power is accumulated in the hands of very few. And we know that this crisis is not just by natural order. It is the result of policies of decades of economic and political decisions that have allowed wealth to accumulate in the hands of such a small number of people. And because we know that the concentration of wealth also leads to the concentration of power, we must have this discussion in the context of what it does to not just people, but to our democracy.
So that's the conversation we're going to have today. We're going to talk about - we're going to hear from some of the leading economists on inequality and on economic - sort of the rules of our economy. We're going to hear about what the state of inequality is today and what are some of the solutions that are necessary to address this inequality. And, you know, our work draws inspiration from movements from around the world.
The Office of International Affairs, which is the office that relates to the diplomatic community but also speaks to the rest of the world from the roots and the experiences of New Yorkers. We believe that New York City, as a place where the world gathers, as a place where the world lives, has an important role to play in the conversation about how to tackle the crisis that we're facing.
And I am so grateful that today we are joined by Professor Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has shaped the global understanding of inequality, its impact on our democracies, and the policies that are necessary to address it. And we're also joined by Professor Zucman, who is the founder of the International Tax Observatory, whose research on taxing extreme wealth is influencing policy debates across the world.
And so, obviously, with our mayor here, we will have a very, very interesting conversation. So, first, let me start by asking: Professor Stiglitz, you recently collaborated with Professor Zucman and many others on the World Inequality Report; can you help us understand what is happening right now? What is the current state of inequality in the world today?
Joseph Stiglitz: So, what you said before is right. We have a global inequality crisis. And the last two meetings of the G20 focused on - it's very hard to get an agreement among the G20 these days, but one of the things that there was a broad consensus [on] is we have a global inequality crisis. President Ramaphosa of South Africa asked me to chair a committee to look at inequality globally, the impact of international rules, why it was increasing so much in so many countries, what were the drivers and impacts and what we could do about it.
The report had a very, very strong - the results resonated very strongly, partly because there were some very telling statistics. One of them just was that since the beginning of the century, you know, [the] last 25 years, 41 percent of all the increase in wealth has gone to the top 1 percent. And the bottom 50 percent of the world has gotten just 1 percent of that increase in wealth. So, inequality has been growing. New York, well, first I should say, [the] United States always likes to claim that it does better than other countries. This is one area where we really do excel. We have more inequality than any other advanced country in so many dimensions.
But New York, within the United States, also excels. You know, one statistic we had a - some of you may - The Guardian, [the] three of us published an op-ed today, and one of the things we said in that op-ed is that the average income of a New Yorker is about $131,000. And if we all shared in that average income, we'd all live reasonably well, even with the affordability crisis. You know, $131,000 you could get by. The problem is that a few people at the top are taking a very large fraction of that average, meaning that millions are getting, you know, to get that average; if a few people are taking off the billions at the top, that means the rest are getting pittances below. And that's the struggle that so many New Yorkers face. I want to say it hasn't always been this way, and in some places and in some countries, it's worse than others. Inequality has grown enormously over the past 40 years.
There's been more people struggling at the bottom. There's been an evisceration of the middle class. And what we've seen in the last year, or two years, is the growth of the oligarchy at the top and the political influence that they have. One of the things that makes what's going on so disturbing is that it's becoming an inherited oligarchy. One of the statistics in our study that garnered a lot of interest was that it is estimated that over the next decade, trillions are going to be passed on from today's billionaires to their children. And so that's really changing the nature of our country.
This inequality has economic, political and social consequences. Recent research has shown that it undermines economic performance and leads to societal polarization. But perhaps most disturbing is its effect on our democracy. With a system, a political system in the United States, that gives [an] unbridled role to money in politics, we've become a country better described by one dollar, one vote than one person, one vote. Of course, as the Bible says, "The poor you shall always have with you." But we don't have to have so many of the poor. And today's extremes, combined with the way they're generated, often with exploitation and market power, and the deprivations and loss of opportunity that result, are at the center of the affordability crisis that you've talked about so eloquently.
One of the factors contributing to this growing inequality is the unfairness of the tax system. Where those at the top, this is really quite remarkable, actually pay a smaller share of their income than those below [them]. President Trump has trumpeted his tax cut. But it was probably the most regressive tax cut in history. With huge gifts to billionaires and rich corporations, miserly cuts to ordinary Americans are more than offset by the reduction in health care benefits through the ACA and Medicaid. The wealthiest revel in not paying their fair share.
In the 1960s - the average - the tax paid by the top 400 was some 50 percent. Today, it's less than half [of] that. So, the money that we're talking about is a lot. Because there's so much money at the top. And that money would have made so much difference to the lives of our community or the people in our community. And over the last, you know, 50 years, these public expenditures, as we become an innovative, more urban economy, have become even more important. So, on this Tax Day, April 15th, let us resolve to correct this gross inequity. At least ask the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. I really don't think that's asking too much. And let me turn, I guess, to Gabriel, who will describe both the inequities in taxation, here and abroad, and what can be done about it.
Gabriel Zucman: Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I want to discuss some good news for once, which is that I think we are at the beginning of an international movement to actually fix some of the problems that Joe mentioned to finally make the super-rich pay their fair share. And that's largely due to some new research that has established the facts, the facts that they pay so little. We suspected that for a long time, but you have to realize that there is a great deal of opacity about the wealth of the super-rich, the income they earn and the taxes they pay. And it's only over the last five [or] six years that this opacity has started to dissipate, thanks to work that's been conducted by different groups of scholars in about a dozen countries. Our International Tax Observatory has been very involved in that project, which has established that pretty much everywhere it's not just a U.S. problem; it is very much a U.S. problem, but it goes beyond that.
Pretty much everywhere, the super-rich pay much less tax relative to their income than other social groups. Often only half as much in tax as what the middle class pays [and] as what the working class pays. Now, there was something really important that happened in 2024, when Brazil had the presidency of the G20 and put this issue on the agenda and, in particular, put forward a proposal to address a problem by creating a new principle, the principle that extreme wealth should come with unavoidable duties towards society. That's the idea of an unavoidable minimum tax for billionaires.
With 2 percent, a minimum tax on their wealth equal to 2 percent of their wealth, the super-rich would contribute at least as much, not even more - they would contribute as much as the rest of the population. Who can be against that? Nobody can be against that. That's why this idea has had such [a] powerful ripple effect and it's being studied in many countries. In France in February last year, the National Assembly passed this 2 percent minimum tax on the super-rich. It was then blocked by the Conservative Senate, but it's going to come back, and it is being discussed in a growing number of countries. Look also at what's happening in California, where thanks to the work of the unions, the healthcare unions, there is a good chance that there will be a billionaire tax that will be put on the ballot in November to create a 5 percent one-off tax on the wealth of California's billionaires.
If it passes, it will be the first ever billionaire tax enacted anywhere in the world. You know, it is not radical to ask the super-rich to pay as much tax as the rest of the population. What's radical is to accept the current status quo, where they are allowed to live in their own - they live in their own parallel society, free of tax. That's not acceptable. And it is by working together, collectively, and by forging a common vision, supporting each other across nations, that we are going to be able to fix that problem. That's why I'm so thrilled [and] so happy that we are having this conversation here today with the mayor in New York City. This is the beginning of a long journey, a long battle to fight international oligarchy, but I'm very confident that in that battle, we shall prevail.
Commissioner Archila: So, Mayor Mamdani, I know that you wake up, and you say, "Tax the rich." But in all seriousness, you are right now waging [and] leading an effort to make sure that New Yorkers have the opportunity to live with dignity. That is really what you wake up doing every day, and I'm wondering [about] your reactions to the two presentations we just heard about the state of inequality and the opportunity that is building, you know, and we are part of it, a movement to actually address inequality by taxing the rich.
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: I think first and foremost, I just want to say thank you for the immense amount of work and scholarship and advocacy that you have both done. It is exactly what has allowed for this moment to be realized by so many in the fight for a fairer world for each and every person who calls it home and continuing in your tradition of good news. I'll say that so much of that scholarship [and] that advocacy, we're already seeing the fruits of it. Just last night, we saw an announcement that we are working together with the governor to introduce New York City's first-ever pied-à-terre tax. This is a tax on properties worth more than $5 million that are owned by people who do not reside in New York City.
The super wealthy who can purchase properties and use them to store their wealth to benefit from New York City's real estate market but [do] not have to pay back into that same city that generates so much of that wealth in the way that they should. And that idea of a fairer society is at the principle of all of this advocacy, because what we are talking about is a recognition of the inequality that has permeated politics through the five boroughs of our city, through our country [and] through the world. I think as you were saying, when we talk about how we are excelling, we have to also admit to a number of things.
You know, one is that [in] New York City, we like to compare ourselves to other global cities across the world, as we should. But if we compare ourselves, for example, to Berlin and Madrid, we find, in fact, that we have 80 percent higher levels of inequality. If we speak honestly about the levels of inequality in this city, we know that our counterpart in that is Panama, in terms of the levels within that society. And when we look at this city and we correctly describe it as the most expensive city in the United States of America, we do so knowing that when we measure the true cost of living here, it shows that more than 5 million New Yorkers cannot afford it.
Sixty-two percent of New Yorkers cannot afford to live in this city. And so, for all of the discussion of the imagined exodus that would take place were we to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers by the appropriate amount, I say imagined because before I was a mayor, I was a state legislator, and I was part of an effort to increase taxes on millionaires at that time. We were told the same thing then. And what we find now is that we have more millionaires today than we did at that time, even after having passed that tax. And so, for all of that conversation about this imagined exodus, we have to reckon with the very real exodus that we are seeing in this city: an exodus of working-class people.
An exodus of those who cannot afford to live here. And for many who work here, who now find their residence in Jersey City, or in Connecticut or in Pennsylvania, anywhere else where their dollar can go a little bit further. And we've seen, just in a snapshot from 2000 to 2020, the city lost 200,000 of its Black residents. That is the cost of inaction. And so that also speaks to the urgency of this conversation and this advocacy, and it is a representation of the fact that while this is a global issue, it is also very much a local issue here in New York City.
Commissioner Archila: Thank you, Mayor Mamdani. So, you referenced one of the objections that we hear all the time about taxing the rich, which is this idea that the wealthy will flee, that they will leave. So, Professor Zucman, you have done a lot of research on this very question. Can you share with us some of that data? What does the data say about the exodus? The myth or the reality of the exodus of the wealthy?
Zucman: It is largely indeed a myth. And it's more than that. It's frankly almost propaganda. That any time there's a government, whether it's a city, a state [or] a country, that considers increasing taxes on the very rich, if only a little bit, you have this whole, you know, myth and threat of migration that's used by the very wealthy to say, "No, no, no, you can't tax us." You know, it's never going to work. Even though the research is very clear. There's a lot of work, careful empirical studies that have been conducted exploiting tax variation, tax increases or tax cuts, and [seeing] how this correlates with migration. And the overwhelming conclusion is that it's not the case that absolutely nobody leaves. You know, there's not zero response. But it's very small. It's extremely small.
Much less than what you could infer if you were just reading the newspapers and the headlines. Perhaps just one example. Massachusetts [in] 2024, introduced a 4 percent surtax on million-dollar earners. It has generated much more revenue than what was projected. Three billion dollars more in 2024 [and in] 2025 than what had been budgeted. So that's, I think, a good illustration that we should be confident that, you know, especially for a city like New York, where so much is happening [and] that has great amenity value, like economists like to say, it's not a small extra tax on millionaires in New York that could push them to flee the city.
Let me just ask that, you know, if a couple of billionaires were to leave, you know, New York or Massachusetts, is that a problem? That's not clear. And I very much agree with what the mayor said. Perhaps New York can afford to lose a couple of billionaires, but it really cannot afford to lose its working class.
Mayor Mamdani: And I think part of this comes back to our vision. Our vision is that everyone stays in the city and that we have room for others to join us in the city. And what we often speak about is that the revenue that we would use from this increased taxation, it is to increase the quality of life of this same city that we all call home. So, if you are a billionaire or a millionaire or if you're a working-class person, you have to deal with so many of the conditions of the city, to varying degrees and [in] varying ways.
But when we're talking about this money, it's an investment back into the very things that New Yorkers measure as the efficacy of a City government in providing daily services. We're talking about, for example, we just had our first hundred days. We have a Department of Transportation that filled in 102,000 potholes in that period of time. Now, I can personally attest to the fact that they are doing it at all hours of the day. At midnight, in the morning, at every single hour of the day, they are doing this work. Part of the reason they can do this work is because of the taxation system that allows for the revenue to fund this work. And so often we speak about aspects of the public sector as if they are guaranteed, as if they are not things that need to be funded, as if they have no relationship to the generation of private wealth, when in fact these are the foundations of that.
And I think, to your point, when we're looking at actual studies about migration, the Fiscal Policy Institute, I think it was, found that the wealthiest New Yorkers leave at one-fourth the rate of other New Yorkers. That when we're talking about actual impacts to migration, the closer correlation is not wealth with new tax status; rather, it's whether you're a young family with a child and you cannot afford child care. Those families are twice as likely to leave as the average New Yorker, because of the fact that in this city, child care is more than $20,000 a year.
And I'll just go back to speak about the level of wealth we're talking about. I shared earlier the pied-à-terre tax. Yesterday, I was standing in front of, I think, 220 Central Park West. Ken Griffin owns a penthouse that he bought, I think, for $228 million, north of $200 million. This is the kind of wealth that is being stored in the city. And it is a residence that is so often empty. And it was actually not that many years ago when a developer told the State Senator Liz Krueger, who represents that district, about a new building to come up. And he said, "Don't worry, no one's actually going to live here, so it won't have an impact on the need for city services." That's the way it's been built into our city's life and its expectation. And now is the opportunity to change so much of this.
Stiglitz: Can I just add and just reinforce that spending that the tax revenue allows makes the city more attractive. So rather than talking about people leaving, solving some of the problems that we have, like filling in the potholes, makes New York even more attractive. So, why don't you talk about immigration, not emigration from the city. The other thing I'd point out is that as the people, [the] ordinary New Yorkers [who] have to leave the city, they have to travel long distances in time. That's a hidden tax on ordinary New Yorkers - who would be ordinary New Yorkers. And actually, if you thought of that time tax, it's an even greater inequality that we impose in our society.
Commissioner Archila: Well, Professor Stiglitz, one of the other objections that we often hear about taxing the rich is that it will produce - it will discourage entrepreneurship. It will slow down economic growth. But during the 40s, and all the way to the 60s, when the top tax rates in the United States were much higher, and the richest households captured a much smaller share of income, the U.S. experienced tremendous economic growth [and] the growth of the middle class. So, can you tell us a little bit about - you've written a lot about this - can you tell us a little bit about that objection and what you understand of it?
Stiglitz: Yeah, again, it's one of these scare tactics that, understandably, the super-rich are trying to say, "Don't touch us because if you do, the whole system will fall apart." As you pointed out, the periods when we had very high taxes, the quarter century after World War II, were the period of our fastest growth. And it was a period because we were getting that revenue; we grew together. The people at the bottom had their incomes grow faster than those up. But everybody was growing, and even under a Republican, Eisenhower, we were investing, as a nation, in infrastructure, education [and] research and that is what gave the economic impetus.
You know, if you think about it in another way, do you really think that Elon Musk would behave any differently if he had to pay his fair share of taxes? He would be just as exploitive. Twitter would be just as bad. He would put all that effort into undermining our society. I don't think he would stop at all in any particular way. He still would want to be the first trillionaire.
So, you know, what motivates these people is not, you know, taking away a little bit of money here or there. It's really power. And that's really part of the danger that we have today. They're using their economic power to become a source of political power.
Commissioner Archila: When a striking statistic I saw recently in a report by V-Dem, the organization that kind of tracks democracies across the world, was that in 2005, 50 percent of the world lived in a democracy. In the last 20 years, when the accumulation of wealth has accelerated so severely in the hands of so very few, the statistics now in 2025 is that only 25 percent of the world lives in a democracy. There has been tremendous democratic backsliding accompanied by the tremendous accumulation of wealth in the hands of very, very few. And, you know, we're in New York City. New Yorkers, we say what we mean, we say what we want. And last year, New Yorkers turned out and in the huge demonstration of democracy - went out into, with historic turnout - to elect you, Mayor Mamdani. To lead the city, in many ways, because of your commitment to tackle inequality.
And so, and to speak to the needs of working-class New Yorkers, to speak to their aspirations, to their dreams. And I wanted to ask you if you would, actually, now that we have sort of addressed or discussed briefly some of the main objections to taxing the rich, whether we can turn our attention to what is possible. If we actually engage the wealthiest few in sharing and making a vision of shared prosperity more possible. I know that this is not a new idea. In fact, when we think about the United States in the 40s and 50s and 60s, and New York State in the 40s and 50s and 60s, when the wealthy paid a much higher tax rate, New York built the SUNY University System. We built public parks. We built Mitchell-Lama housing. And we created a city where working families could afford to live. So, when you say in your 100-day rally, "I am committed to taxing the rich," what is the vision that animates that call? And what is the material sort of experience that New Yorkers will have if we succeed in actually getting the rich to contribute their fair share?
Mayor Mamdani: So, I think, before I speak of the vision, I want to address one additional thing that has come up in our conversation, which is what we have money for in this country. We are speaking right now, having a conversation as our country has spent now close to $30 billion on a war in multiple countries in the Middle East that has killed thousands of people. It is a war that is costing at least $500 million a day. And the return on that is images of our country bombing girls' schools in Iran. And as we look at that, we have to remember it as part of the same conversation that we have about the struggles of working-class people. Because the same amounts of money would be transformative for the lives of working-class people across the city, across this country. And the choice instead to invest that kind of money in war is a choice that - it doesn't just speak of a complete abdication of our political, economic and moral responsibilities. It also speaks to a choice that will itself exacerbate this cost-of-living crisis and that we're seeing that already in this city.
Now, our vision, when we speak about taxing the rich, when we speak about what we want this city to be, it's a vision of a city where working-class people can do more than struggle. It's a vision of a city where we build on the successes of today and deliver something transformative for tomorrow. When I talk about making buses fast and free, it is as much an economic necessity as it is a necessity for the peace of mind of working-class people. Because the anxiety that also comes with precarity is one that is often not measured. You were saying earlier, if we were to measure the time tax, we would see this inequality at an even larger chasm. And yet we see that time and time again that this struggle to afford the most basic things, it has so many knock-on effects. Part of the reason that our city is putting forward our first-ever city-run grocery stores, one in each borough, is also because we want to make it easier to live a healthy life in this city. We keep telling working-class people to eat healthier, to live healthier, yet we don't reckon with the fact that it's cheaper to do the opposite in this city and in this country. So, if we want better outcomes, we have to make those outcomes easier to pick.
When we speak about this vision, it's a vision of an understanding that a city and a society has that if we want to grow our population, if we want to grow the families of New Yorkers across the five boroughs, we have to make it easier to raise those children. So, it's a vision as well where child care is truly universal. We're proud of the fact that we have finally fixed universal childcare for three-year-olds. We're delivering universal childcare for two-year-olds, first time in our city's history. We want to continue that. We want to extend that to one-year-olds. We want to extend that to children as young as six weeks, because what we want is a recognition that for too long, we have asked the working class of this city to bear with unimaginable costs and then asked ourselves why the outcomes are not the way that we would like them to be.
And I think even the examples that you mentioned, frankly, if we were to say those examples today as a reference of what we were aspiring for, we would be told that they were unrealistic. If we were to speak of CUNY today or SUNY today or Mitchell-Lama today or the rapid expansion of the subway system today, we would be told that goes beyond the possible. And we have to ask ourselves, why is it - and I'll say this also as a Democrat - that the ambition that we are looking for can so often only be found in our party's history, as opposed to in the present or in the future.
And I think to what you both speak of, we have to have a recognition that this is a global issue. It requires a global response. The proposal is the right one about an implementation of a two percent tax on wealth across the globe. And much like the climate crisis, we cannot allow ourselves to wait for a global agreement to take local action. And that's why it's so exciting to be here with so many, frankly, who have been on the front lines of this advocacy to ensure that we are creating a fairer city. And we're doing so by asking the questions of our tax system that we've so long been told that it's not even possible to question. And when we do question it, we realize, in fact, that it can be different, it must be different, and we're starting to make it different ourselves.
Commissioner Archila: I would love, if we can, to you know - we are kind of looking at our state's, our city's history to fortify our commitment and our belief that a different approach is possible and makes life, makes incredible things possible for people, looking at Mitchell-Lama Housing and SUNY and CUNY and beautiful public parks. I wonder if you can share, Professor Zucman and Stiglitz, other kind of shining examples of how, of places where, or moments in history where the coexistence of high taxes and economic growth kind of help us illustrate that point again, of the kind of the dignity that is made possible by engaging the wealthiest few in a relationship of interdependence, quite frankly, with the rest of the world.
Stiglitz: Well, let me first begin by just reminding us that when we were making some of those investments you were talking about before in our building parks like Central Park or creating CUNY and, you know, our great city universities or national universities, or back in the 50s with Eisenhower investing in infrastructure - we were a much poorer country. You know, we don't think about it, but we've been growing at one, two, three percent a year. So, if we think about that, going back, we were poorer. And yet we managed to do those things. And then people say, "Well, we can't afford it." What does that mean? These are, as the mayor said, elements of choice. What we choose to do with our resources. Do we choose to try, as a community, to make a more livable city where the environment is one where we really enjoy life? Or, you know, I know there are other cities that are really not very livable. You know, you can survive. You can make a living. But it's not livable in the sense of being enjoyable.
So, it's a question of how we as a society decide to spend our resources. And that you can think of in two divisions. How much we spend collectively versus individually. And that's where the taxes become really important. And then what we do with that public money. Do we spend it - I used to say - on weapons that don't work against enemies that don't exist? And, you know, or killing people? Today it was actually some of the numbers I've seen are more like a billion dollars in just ordinances every day in the bombs. So, that money could have been used for other purposes. And economics is always the choice, is a study of the choice of how we allocate our resources. And that's why I think both of us are, you know, have thought so much. And what we're saying is, we're not allocating our scarce resources in the way that maximizes the well-being of New York, of the United States or in countries elsewhere in the world.
Commissioner Archila: Professor Zucman.
Zucman: I think it's very important for this country, the United States, to reconnect with its own tradition and its own history of using taxation, progressive income taxation, progressive wealth taxation with the estate tax, to not only fund all of the things that we discussed - universities, that are the envy of the world - but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to regulate inequality, to protect and advance democracy. You know, there's a famous speech of FDR in Congress in 1942 where he says, "Look, I think that no American should have an income after paying taxes of more than $25,000." Of the time, that's the equivalent of $2 million today. "Therefore, I propose to create a 100 percent tax on all income above $25,000." And, you know, people in Congress are like, you know, "100 percent, perhaps that's a bit too much."
But they agree on 94 percent, which is not very far from 100 percent. And that was the reality of U.S. tax policy during World War II, but also continuing in 1950s, 60s, 70s, up until Reagan. And the idea was not to collect revenue - although the U.S. did that by taxing big companies, in particular, with a high corporate tax of 50 percent - but the idea was really that extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It's the power to influence policymaking. It's the power to influence the prevailing ideology, to buy elections, and so on. And that we should use the tax system to regulate this power. And I think reconnecting with that tradition is going to be really crucial as we face this battle between democracy and oligarchy at the global level, which is really the defining battle of the 21st century.
Commissioner Archila: And I see we are sadly coming to a close. We have just a few more minutes, but I wanted to ask each of you to speak very briefly about what the role of the fight here in New York has in this global movement to address inequality. And we'll start with you, Professor Zucman.
Zucman: A huge role. I think we have to work together across borders, across nations. We have to support each other. We have to cooperate. We have to forge a common vision. And New York City, this global metropolis with incredible influence, people all over the world are really looking at what's being discussed today, what's being enacted, what's being done in New York City as a model for the future. I think New York has an incredible role to play. And this is the beginning. In just a few days, several world leaders are going to meet in Barcelona, invited by the [prime minister] of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, to discuss these very issues, to press ahead, to forge this common vision, building on the work that was started at the G20 in 2024. Of course, as Joe said, nothing is happening, can happen at the G20 today, but you have a number of countries that have joined forces to work together to create this 2 percent minimum tax on global billionaires. And there will be about 15 heads of state meeting in Barcelona in just a few days to advance this very important agenda.
Stiglitz: You know, I had the opportunity to travel all over the world, and one of the striking things as we've traveled is everywhere, you are known.
[Points to Mayor Mamdani.]
You are as famous as Donald Trump. And the point I want to make is that the election in New York got so much attention everywhere because it was symbolic. It showed that there was another side of the United States, that there were, you know, a city - which is the largest Jewish city - could elect somebody of very different persuasion, a religious belief. So, it was a real testimony to the good side of humanity. And we need affirmation of that there exists a good side to humanity right now. So, I think one can't underestimate the influence that New York has on the entire world as a symbol of what is possible. Now, one of the things I liked about, you know, when you were campaigning, was you talked about affordability, but you went through all the elements of what makes for a good city and for a good life, and, you know, affordability.
Housing, transport, food. And, you know, take the issue of food. It wasn't just the issue of getting the price down a little bit. You know, margins on food are not that great. But the grocery store, we have in a rich country, we have food deserts where you cannot get fresh food, meat, vegetables, and so forth. And we have grocery stores who push unhealthy food because that's where there are more profits. So, trying to create a more, as I say, livable city, a healthier city, a thriving city, and a city where people work together, and it's not just a city of the elite, is really, I think, at the core of what your vision is. And I think that vision is a vision which will be very influential all over the world.
Mayor Mamdani: I think just in our conversation today, you can see the power of example. We are continuing to cite example after example of how these beliefs can actually not only be implemented but can be successful. When Massachusetts takes that step to implement that new surcharge, it can then be cited here in New York as an example for what we could see if we were to do the same. And I think this is something that Senator Sanders often shares with me and shares with so many others, is if you can make something work in New York City, it is allowed to be the proof of concept for it to work elsewhere. And I think that is what animates so many here, is that we know our struggles to afford life in the place that we call our home, those are not unique to New York City. That is a reality for working class people across the country, across the world. The struggle against inequality, it's not distinct. It is in fact becoming part of the human experience.
And what we are so excited by is by recognizing once again that New York City is a home to the world. We have more than 3 million of our 8.5 million residents are immigrants. I'm one of them. And that this is the moment in time where we can show ourselves once again as part of being that same world that can advance a fairer vision for all of us. And I think just once again, truly to say to both of you, that your research, your clarity, your bringing together struggles that have previously been thought of as isolated ones is instead part of one larger global issue. It is not only refreshing, but it is clarifying to all of us as to what our work must be in this moment. And I think there are many, myself included, who have gone through moments in our politics where it feels as if we could not ever get any further from the truth. And yet what we are able to see in this moment is in fact that there is so much we can do. There is so much we can deliver. And that when we win anywhere, it can then be used as an example to win everywhere. So, thank you so much.
Commissioner Archila: Well, and I will say that in this administration, we say all the time that solidarity is a practice, not a slogan. And in our role in the Office of International Affairs, it is an office of solidarity. We look forward to working with all of you to tackle this very crisis that affects all of us and to build together a future where everyone, here in New York City, here in the United States, and across the world, can live with dignity. Thank you all so, so much for joining us this morning. Thank you so much, Professor Zucman and Stiglitz and Mayor Mamdani.
Mayor Mamdani: And thank you to our incredible moderator, our commissioner of International Affairs, Ana María Archila.
