A question has gripped economists studying inequality since at least 2011, when Occupy Wall Street split the country into the 1% and the 99%: who is actually wealthy in the U.S, and how did they get that way?
In 2014, Eric Zwick, Owen Zidar and Danny Yagan set out to find an answer. They weren’t the tenure-track economics faculty they are today (at the University of Chicago, Princeton University and UC-Berkeley, respectively) and all they had was a hunch and a key to the Treasury Department. Planet Money reported that they called themselves the “tax ninjas,” but they were essentially glorified interns: Zwick was living in his sister’s attic in Washington D.C. and going to work in the Treasury Department’s basement, where the ninjas attacked a trove of individual tax records that most academics never get to see.
