Professor Brooke Harrington, a widely cited commentator on the mechanisms the ultra-rich use to hide their wealth and evade tax, says that while the field of sociology has studied issues of social inequality for more than a century, one side of the equation has often been ignored.
“It's important for us as sociologists to know that if we're making claims about inequality, and that's a big part of our work, we shouldn't just study poor people,” said Harrington, the sociology professor.
She points out that people at the economic bottom have to provide a lot of personal information to public welfare agencies, employers, banks and educational institutions, so there is a huge amount of data that can be easily collected and studied.
“The rich are very hard to study because they can use their wealth to evade scrutiny,” she says. “For over 100 years, sociology has claimed to know something about inequality, but in fact it can't, because the whole high end of the spectrum is obscured in the clouds. There have always been a few scholars trying to fix that, and about 15 years ago, I joined them.”
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For over 100 years, sociology has claimed to know something about inequality, but in reality it can’t, because the entire upper end of the spectrum is obscured in the clouds.
Attribution
Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology
Harrington's research stretches back to the turn of the last century and examines how the modern asset management industry, professional associations and elite private organisations have protected wealth and concentrated power in the hands of a select few.
Harrington earned a BA in English Literature from Stanford University and earned an MA and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University, where he specialized in organizational and economic sociology.
Her book, Capital Without Borders: Asset Management and the 1%was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. It has since been translated into several languages, including Russian and Japanese, and received the Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility in 2018.
The book examines how asset managers use offshore banks, shell companies and trusts to shield billions of dollars from tax and other legal obligations. As part of his research, Harrington trained and gained professional qualifications as an asset manager.
Professor Mark Dixon, chair of the sociology department, said Harrington encourages discussion of important issues both in the classroom and through his public visibility.
“Brooke is a great public intellectual,” Dixon says. “She has the rare combination of innovative scholarship and the ability to communicate her core insights beyond her own discipline. Atlantic or peer-reviewed journals, Brooke is clearly expanding Dartmouth’s reach.”
Over the past decade, Harrington has written and commentated in the following publications: The Washington Post, The New York Times, economistand Foreign Affairs It's been in the news amid leaks of documents from offshore tax havens, financial sanctions against Russian oligarchs, and a dispute over President Donald Trump's tax returns.
“When the Panama Papers were exposed in 2016 and the Paradise Papers in 2017, we saw a whole host of bad guy faces coming out,” Harrington says. “It included heads of state and celebrities, but also arms dealers and drug lords, because they were all using the same techniques.”
These secret accounts subvert the social contract, she says, “because their real purpose is to circumvent the law. If you don't want to pay your creditors or legal judgments, offshore is the place to go. It's like an escape hatch from the constraints of the modern world. You get all the benefits that other people are paying for, without paying your share.”
While tax evasion is as old as taxes, Harrington attributes the brazen sense of impunity of the rich and super-rich to the financialization of society that has taken place over the past 50 years, particularly in the U.S. “Financialization means that finance becomes the standard that's applied to everything,” he says. “It's the idea that everything should be measured by one standard, which is profit.”
This hasn't always been the case in the United States, and it's not the norm in many Western democracies today, she says. “I believe one of the problems in the United States is that the vocabulary of mutual obligation has been stolen from our civil society. We have no way of talking about it.”
When Harrington arrived at Dartmouth in 2019, she found that students there, and before that at Brown University, were eager to learn about socioeconomic inequality.
In his classes on “Organizations in Society” and “Markets and Management,” Harrington says he tries to provide students with “an analytical toolkit to understand the principles out of which organizations and markets emerge — the principles by which they function.”
Through this lens, students explore issues such as the relationship between wealth, taxation and inequality, the formation of transnational professional elites, and the sociology of financial markets and offshore banking. The key, she tells her students, is not to condemn capitalist structures but to explain how capitalism relies on the rule of law, other functions of government, and informal social norms.
“Part of the ideological problem in America is that any criticism of capitalism, any criticism of finance is immediately labeled as communism or socialism, and this is a very good way to deflect legitimate criticism,” she says.
Harrington, who taught at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark for eight years after working in Germany and Italy, told students: “I lived in a very capitalist country that put very simple constraints on market activity so that people could thrive together. That's not only possible, it's common. But we're so isolated in the United States and so immersed in a public discourse that says constrained capitalism is impossible.”
Harrington speaks of the importance of a lively exchange of ideas among her students and in her writing. of National Review.
“I grew up watching William F. Buckley Firing Line“He was probably my role model more than anyone else. I owe it to him that I wanted to be an intellectual ever since I was a child.”
Harrington says that in his classes, writings and commentaries, he isn't interested in the conclusions that thinkers reach, “but I am very interested in their analytical process. Are they actually taking accurate information and evaluating it in a critical and sophisticated way? That's what I teach my students. Many students contact me years later and say they took my class and found it very helpful.”
