“The academic economic literature on capital taxation has for decades relied on a few canonical optimal tax models that forcefully argued that capital taxes play a minor role in an optimal tax system,” wrote a pair of Swedish economists, Spencer Bastani and Daniel Waldenstrom, in an article published in the Journal of Economic Surveys last year. “In recent years, however, scholars have started to recognize that these models do a rather poor job of explaining actual inequality in wealth and capital income, and new theoretical perspectives and empirical observations are challenging the established conventional wisdom.” In an interview, Waldenstrom says the new thinking could go too far, saying some scholars are ignoring the harm that high tax rates can do. "