Monday, September 19, 2016

Talk at Ohio State Law School today

Today at Ohio State Law School, I gave a talk on a piece  that, in the form I presented it, is somewhat of a hybrid between a forthcoming U Miami Law Review article of mine and chapter 2 of my book in progress on high-end inequality.  The "long" version, which features a far more extensive discussion of Diamond & Saez's work on high-end tax rates than I will try to cram into the book, is available here.

The article is entitled "The Mapmaker's Dilemma in Assessing High-End Inequality."  My talk mainly addressed the piece itself, but also touched more generally on my book project, on which I felt I received encouragement as well as a couple of good suggestions regarding novels I might consider.  I will post slides from the talk once I am back at NYU (tomorrow) and can conveniently create a link to them on the NYU Law website.

It was nice to see a couple of former students of mine who now teach tax at OSU, and also to get a sense that people in other disciplines than law may find the project interesting.  As it happens, publishing the book is not quite as straightforward as it is for my more standard tax policy volumes - it's kind of in a unique genre or creating a genre, which makes it slower and harder work to write.  My current first choice is to find a sympathetic editor at a university press who would not just publish it, but offer helpful feedback reflecting such individual's complementary knowledge set to mine.  (I hadn't generally felt a need for that in my straight-up tax or budget or entitlements policy books.)  But a second thought could be to find an interesting non-university press that was intrigued by and right for the project.  It's a bit too high-end (like the inequality I discuss in it) for a mass audience, but there is the potential to interest a lot of readers who would not be so interested in, say, my previous book, Fixing U.S. International Taxation.

 Any thoughts on this that readers of this blog might have would be most welcome.

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