As the American presidential election nears, Stanford political scientist and TEC director Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage (New York University) argue that the next president could deal with voter resentment by ending lower effective tax rates for the wealthiest Americans.

In today's social climate of acknowledged and growing inequality, why are there not greater efforts to tax the rich? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage ask when and why countries tax their wealthiest citizens—and their answers may surprise you.

Taxing the Rich draws on unparalleled evidence from twenty countries over the last two centuries to provide the broadest and most in-depth history of progressive taxation available. Scheve and Stasavage explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven't. Fairness in debates about taxing the rich has depended on different views of what it means to treat people as equals and whether taxing the rich advances or undermines this norm. Scheve and Stasavage argue that governments don't tax the rich just because inequality is high or rising—they do it when people believe that such taxes compensate for the state unfairly privileging the wealthy. Progressive taxation saw its heyday in the twentieth century, when compensatory arguments for taxing the rich focused on unequal sacrifice in mass warfare. Today, as technology gives rise to wars of more limited mobilization, such arguments are no longer persuasive.

Taxing the Rich shows how the future of tax reform will depend on whether political and economic conditions allow for new compensatory arguments to be made.

Kenneth Scheve is professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the coauthor of Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers. David Stasavage is Julius Silver Professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. He is the author of States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities (Princeton).

Listen to a podcast with Ken Scheve on themes addressed in this book, on FSI's WorldClass.

Following her signing of an open letter registering concerns about potential privacy abuses with Digital India and her op-ed "How to Think About Modi's Visit to Silicon Valley," Stanford historian Priya Satia addresses the hate mail and criticism those actions precipitated, ironically enough from defenders of India's Hindus' "particular tolerance."

In an exploration of the sea and images, Margaret Cohen revisits the Beginner's Guide to Photography Underwater, a seminal work by artist and fisherman Ron Church, in the Summer 2015 edition of Wax. 

After the attacks in Paris, TEC faculty affiliate Russell A. Berman argues that "ISIS is hardly the only challenge to American power and the international order" and that "strategic thinking has to consider long term issues and not merely react to immediate events or even the most terrible headlines." Instead, he encourages the U.S. to strengthen alliances with the Europeans and the Sunnis in the December 1, 2015 edition of The Caravan.

"Geography and Gridlock in the United States" is chapter 7 of the book Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily and published by the Cambridge University Press.

Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from the polarization in our politics. This volume assembles several of the nation's top analysts of American politics to focus on solutions to polarization. The proposals range from constitutional change to good- government reforms to measures to strengthen political parties. Each tackles one or more aspects of America's polarization problem. This book begins a serious dialogue about reform proposals to address the obstacles that polarization poses for contemporary governance.

In the digital world there are no pauses. If one is not constantly involved, he risks becoming disconnected. With that in mind, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht began blogging for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2011, where he uses the digital format as a place of contemplation and intellectual debate. The compactness and rhythm of the genre afford him the opportunity to analyze everyday phenomena and philosophical questions. Gumbrecht explores the dissonances in self-understanding that confront his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic. In this embracing of complexity and provocation, the blog is like a thorn in the flesh that calls into question the cherished habits and conventional expectations of Western Europeans.

After an American hostage was mistakenly killed in a CIA drone strike, Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that oversight of and attitudes toward the drone program should be examined in light of continuing civilian deaths in the AfPak region in the April 30, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post.

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song is. They argue that the story of the Bond song is the story of the pop song more generally, and perhaps even the story of its end.

Each chapter discusses a particular segment of the Bond canon and contextualizes it in its era's music and culture. But the book also asks how Bond and his music reflected and influenced our feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money, and aging. Through these individual pieces the book presents the Bond song as the perfect anthem of late capitalism. The Bond songs want to talk about the fulfillment that comes from fast cars, shaken Martinis and mindless sex, but their unstable speakers, subjects, and addressees actually undercut the logic of the lifestyle James Bond is sworn to defend. The book is an invitation to think critically about pop music, about genre, and about the political aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century and beyond.