Stiglitz is a former chief economist of the World Bank, and Diamond is an MIT professor who was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board by then president Barack Obama but withdrew after Republican opposition.
The letter’s other signatories are: Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for work analysing the differences in prosperity between nations; Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won in 2019 for work in development economics; and Paul Krugman, the trade economist turned political commentator

The Golden State might be able to stomach more ultra-wealthy departures than first feared.

A 2021 ProPublica investigation found that between 2014 and 2018, the country’s 25 richest people saw their net worths rise a collective $401 billion, although they paid $13.6 billion in federal income tax, a rate of only 3.4%. The average federal income tax rate, meanwhile, stands at 14.5%, according to the Tax Foundation.