Until the past few weeks, conventional wisdom had it that the truly gobsmackingly wealthy paid a relative pittance in income taxes. The Treasury Department put the rate that the 400 richest families paid at 23 percent, while the Congressional Budget Office said it was 24 percent and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation had it at 26 percent.

Now, the Biden White House is out with its own calculation. The 400 richest families, the White House now documents in a just-released study, don’t pay a relative pittance after all. They pay an absolute pittance: From 2010 to 2018, just 8.2 percent of their income.

To arrive at these numbers, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, two administration economists included in their calculations something that those other three studies left out: the unrealized capital gains in each year they studied that the 400 made as their wealth increased, chiefly through the run-up in the stocks they owned. Lest you think this innovation to be far-left folderol, consider: When the wealth of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and our other gazillionaires is calculated by such mainstream monitors as Fortune, Forbes, and the Journal itself, they are chiefly measuring the value of these rich folks’ stock holdings. Greg Leiserson and Danny Yagan, the two economists who authored the study, figured that if the conventional measure of these folks’ wealth was calculated in this manner, it only made sense to calculate their income in this manner as well.

Makes sense to me.

Now then, a word on Danny Yagan, whom Biden appointed to the post of chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget. Before he took the job, Yagan was an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley, in the very department that I profiled in the Prospect earlier this year as the source of much of the new focus—both empirical and progressive—of contemporary economics, which has informed the policies of the Democrats’ new progressive mainstream. And the Yagan-Leiserson study follows by several days the adoption by 136 nations of a global corporate minimum tax rate, for which another Berkeley economics professor, Gabriel Zucman, provided crucial background research on global tax dodging.

And to complete this month’s Berkeley trifecta, yesterday the Nobel Prize in economics went to three economists, two of whom divide one-half of the prize money, while the third gets the other half. That third economist is David Card, who, as chairman of the Berkeley Economics Department, has turned that department into the powerhouse it is today. In partnership with the late Alan Krueger, Card also kicked off the empirical revolution in economics with their groundbreaking study of two adjacent counties that happened to be under different minimum-wage laws (one was in New Jersey, the other in Pennsylvania) and documented that low-wage employment levels in both counties remained the same. Card followed up with another study showing that the entry into the Miami labor force of thousands of recently imprisoned Cubans in the wake of the Mariel Boatlift didn’t depress Miami-area wages. For decades, economists had said these kinds of changes would have disruptive consequences, basing their conclusions on equations that relied on a standard model of economic behavior. What Card did was to substitute actual data for most of those equations, producing irrefutable evidence that those equations’ predictions had scant resemblance to empirical reality. Today, Card’s onetime heresy provides a foundation not just for Berkeley economics, but also for mainstream economics and White House economics—and Nobel Prize economics, too.