Named by The New Yorker as one of the Best Books of 2025
A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America's most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.
Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential-or more utterly opaque-than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it's an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it's unfair?
Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America's byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.
This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America's wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly-and maddeningly-cheap.
About the Author :
Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.
Review :
“The U.S. tax code is around seven thousand pages long; Madoff makes its failures gripping and accessible in a book that can be read, with as much pleasure as indignation, in an afternoon.”
“Madoff breaks down how the uber wealthy are creating dynasties by avoiding W-2 income and manipulating tax rules designed to promote charitable giving in this must-read book. The implications for our overall economy, democracy, and the rule of law are sobering. ”
“In The Second Estate, Ray Madoff, a law professor, offers a lively and illuminating analysis of the ‘new class of tax-free Americans’. The book’s title is a reference to pre-Revolutionary France, in which the second estate comprised the largely untaxed nobility. The class in Madoff’s crosshairs is not so much America’s top 1 per cent or even 0.1 per cent: it is the Larry Ellisons, Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs, the ‘plutocratic rich’ in the rarefied air of the top 0.01 per cent. Madoff clearly shows how America’s very wealthy shield themselves from taxation. Conventional wisdom has it that this is a matter of sequestering riches offshore, in tax havens. But while offshoring clearly plays a role . . . Madoff explains that much of the problem actually lies closer to home, in the US’s own tax code, which, she says, is, after the Constitution, the ‘single most important document affecting Americans’ lives’, if one of the least well understood.”
“I've known the tax code is borked for a while. . . . But Madoff's book . . . helped give shape to that fury. It's written for people who aren't law professors to understand, with a rich mix of history, analysis, and an actual argument . . . about how we can actually change the way taxes work—in our lifetimes.”
“In clear, accessible prose, Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, explains exactly how the U.S. income tax system became ‘a means for increasing concentrations of wealth.’ Every copy should come with a coupon for a torch and a pitchfork.”
"Whatever one thinks of the appropriate role of government or the social benefits of wealth, it seems clear that some extreme of wealth inequality is harmful to a country’s well-being. Madoff’s prose is engaging and accessible . . . . Her proposals,
whether one ultimately agrees with them or not, certainly deserve to start a balanced conversation."
“This concise and accessible work depicts the recent evolution of the United States tax system into an institution that cultivates and preserves dynastic wealth. . . . Madoff (law, Boston College) offers a playbook for building dynastic wealth: buy, borrow, die, inherit. Buy investments. Borrow against those investments for tax-free consumption. Leave the appreciated investments to the next generation. While those assiduously following the playbook avoid taxation, working families, rich and poor, are left to fund the government through their income and payroll contributions. Noting the corrosive effects of a tax-privileged elite, Madoff offers a simple reform agenda: replace the moribund estate tax with a robust inheritance tax while regulating the excesses of modern philanthropy. . . . Recommended.”
“The tax code may be one reason why billionaire households have raced so far ahead of mere millionaires. . . . Billionaires have ways to lower their tax bills that aren’t available to most Americans. A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed. Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College and author of The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, points to Mark Zuckerberg’s dollar-a-year wage at Meta. Warren Buffett took an annual salary of $100,000 for decades. . . . the very fact of the rising concentration of wealth in the hands of the superwealthy means the issue of how to tax it won’t be going away, and pressure could build for ever-more populist measures, including at the national level.”
“The secret tax lives of the rich have long been unknowable. No more. Madoff renders her essential exposé with generosity and wit, making The Second Estate as enjoyable as it is devastating.”
“Madoff exposes the misalignment of the US tax code, especially how it serves the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of working Americans. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand one of the defining shortfalls of our country.”
“The Second Estate details the intricacies by which the tax code creates two tax systems: one for wage earners, one for those with financial income. Within this system, billionaires benefit from the lower tax rates, tax deferrals, and can even escape tax entirely. Madoff’s answer—not for the faint of heart—is to pursue the daunting challenge of tax reform, building a fairer tax system that is better suited to today’s economic disparities.”
“No one but Ray Madoff could write a page-turner on the US tax code. The Second Estate is a startling exposé of how the richest Americans are accumulating wealth in ways that are nearly, if not completely, tax-free. Madoff shows how they did it and how we got here. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in the rise of economic inequality and extreme wealth.”
“No one is happy with the US tax system. Madoff presents a clear and comprehensive look at how America’s most affluent households have taken advantage—legally—of the various complexities in the tax code to shield themselves from the taxes that ordinary Americans pay. Understanding these tactics is critical to designing a better system in a world with substantial inequality and an unsustainable fiscal outlook.”
“The most important book you could read this year on tax policy and reducing inequality. Readable and illuminating, Madoff explains how a tax system can protect democracy and strengthen an economy—or fuel an oligarchic upward redistribution of wealth and power.”
