Thomas Piketty, presenting the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in 2015, identified a gap in the knowledge of SA’s social system that has yet to be cleared up. As a scholar who spent decades studying wealth in many countries, he complained that there is "so little information about wealth" in SA. This is partly because "access to estate tax data is extremely difficult ... so it’s extremely difficult to show how many taxpayers transmitted wealth". But it is more important to know about the wealth of the living than wealth at death. Piketty therefore proposed a very low annual tax on individual wealth, not for the funds it would produce but because it would reveal "who owns what". But why should we bother if it does not deliver a large sum to the fiscus ? The answer lies in the generally accepted view that SA is one of the world’s most unequal countries, if not the most unequal. This judgment is based on only half of the available information — data on incomes (derived from tax data), no...
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