The Incompleteness of Offshore Leaks

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These leaks are of the whole universe of wealth management offshore activity but they're all that we've got because otherwise this data is completely held in secret there's no way to know who holds what offshore. The information went to an organization called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) They strip out a lot of identifying information and make the rest publicly available online anyone can find it. We began to observe some very interesting and unexpected patterns like wow this seems to behave like a scale-free network and huh wealthy people from different parts of the world such as Russia and China and the United States and Hong Kong have very different patterns of relationship to both wealth managers and offshore structures.

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

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Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

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