Dartmouth Events

How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? From playboy billionaires avoiding taxes on private islands to Russian oligarchs sailing away from sanctions on their superyachts, the ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world’s ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way.  In Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, sociologist Brooke Harrington reveals how this system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend. Harrington spent eight years infiltrating this secretive world by training as a wealth manager, traveling from glossy European and North American capitals to developing countries in South America and Africa, to islands in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South Pacific regions. Through interviews with dozens of wealth managers in nineteen countries, Harrington uncovered how this global network of offshore financial centers arose from the remnants of colonialism and has created a new, hidden imperial class.

Brooke Harrington is Professor of Economic Sociology at Dartmouth College. For the past 16 years, her research has examined inequality from the top end of the socio-economic spectrum, via the inner workings of the offshore financial system. Through an innovative research strategy that included two years earning accreditation as an offshore wealth manager and eight years of immersive fieldwork with practicing wealth managers in 18 offshore financial centers like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Mauritius, she developed uniquely sociological insights on the contribution of offshore finance to economic inequality and the decline of democratic institutions.

Chuck Collins is a campaigner and storyteller who directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits Inequality.org. He is author of several popular books including: The Wealth Hoarders,  Born on Third Base, and, with Bill Gates Sr., Wealth and Our Commonwealth.