Stefanie Stantcheva is a professor at Harvard University and the founder and director of the Social Economics Lab, which studies how people think about economic issues and policies. In April 2025 she won the John Bates Clark medal, awarded each year by the American Economic Association to the leading economist under the age of 40, in part for her work on optimal taxation and innovation. She has found that personal income taxes and corporate levies significantly deter innovation, though targeted policies such as research-and-development subsidies can serve as counterweights.
In 2016, with Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, she demonstrated that the aggregated utility functions traditionally used in optimal-tax theory could be replaced by more general "weights" reflecting society's ethical priorities, allowing policymakers to specify how much they value each person's marginal dollar of income and then derive efficient tax rates from those preferences.
Ms Stantcheva's surveys suggest that people tend to ascribe price rises to factors beyond their control—greedy corporations, feckless politicians—but attribute increases in their wages to their own professional prowess. In other words, they believe they deserve not just the real increase in their wages, but the nominal increase, too. This asymmetry helps explain why periods of high inflation feel so punishing even when real wages are rising.
Ms Stantcheva has written about the "zero-sum mentality"—the belief that one person's gain must come at another's expense. Research on the deficit-populism link suggests that this mentality makes debates about immigration, public services and benefits more potent during periods of austerity.
Her work shows that zero-sum thinkers favour protectionism and tighter borders—sentiments now common in the rich world.
As you grow older, you will still do foolish things, but you will do them with much more enthusiasm.