Understanding how individuals shape their preferences and opinions is central to understanding how habits turn into political preferences, and political preferences into votes. In our project, we study how wealth concentration challenges democracy, and right now, how corporate tax frameworks like the TCJA have deepened the concentration of multinational profits and, with it, individual wealth. [ ]
While European politicians debate whether a carbon tax is politically survivable, and American ones dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act, the decisive question of the green industrial revolution has quietly been settled. The state capable of coordinating capital, technology and labour at the scale required to decarbonise an industrial economy already exists. It is not in [ ]
Half the country s fuel supply locked behind blockades, the Defence Forces called in, and the government writing a €505 million cheque in the hope that the problem would go away. It won t. Ireland has no serious plan to get off fossil fuels. The immediate trigger is clear enough. The US-Israeli war on Iran closed the [ ]
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rewrote the rules of the game for US multinationals. When it passed in 2017, the TCJA was sold as a large-scale repatriation, a measure that would put a damper on profit shifting. Research by the International Tax Observatory and our own investigations at Democracy Challenged tell a different story. [ ]
The question Europe keeps asking itself is whether it can afford the green industrial revolution. It is the wrong question. The right question is why Europe is financing everybody else s. Six trillion euro of European savings are sitting in American assets, funding American consumption and American industrial policy. Europe is not short of capital. Europe [ ]
In 2006, while studying for a masters in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, I took a module with Prof. Ruth Sonderegger that involved a close reading of both volumes of Jürgen Habermas s Theory of Communicative Action. She went on to supervise my thesis, which became a sustained critique of Habermas s framework. My argument was [ ]
The squeezed middle is real, but our measures are designed to miss it Everyone agrees the middle class is under pressure. Few agree on who the middle class actually is. And almost nobody talks about the fact that how we define and measure the middle is itself a political choice, one that shapes what governments [ ]
One fact should sit at the centre of debates about inequality and democratic decline: corporate profits are extremely concentrated, and taxes on those profits fall overwhelmingly on the super rich. Ownership of companies, shares, patents and intellectual property is highly concentrated. When profits are taxed, the burden falls on a narrow and wealthy group. When [ ]
3.5 min read This post argues that the erosion of the corporate income tax (CIT) has quietly removed one of the main fiscal constraints on extreme wealth accumulation in the United States. As we move into 2026, the wealth tax is likely to become a central protagonist in public debate, and it should. But one [ ]
Eurostat’s new figures expose the gulf between Ireland’s sky-high GDP and the ordinary consumption levels experienced by households. Every year Eurostat publishes two quietly revealing numbers. One is GDP per capita, the noisy headline indicator beloved by finance ministries. The other is Actual Individual Consumption per capita, or AIC, a far more grounded measure of [ ]