It won them lots of praise. To say their view of the global economy is one-sided, though, would be drastically to understate their intellectual aphasia. Their grasp begins and ends with the assumption that exports are good and imports are bad. The federal tax code harbors favors for the wealthy, while lower-income taxpayers receive few breaks. No surprise there.
Common sense suggests that widespread non-compliance has always existed.
In this case, common sense is wrong. As Barlett and Steele show through their usual prodigious research, until the 1970s most taxpayers reported most of their income. But fear as a motivator is better than no motivator. Barlett and Steele are masters at mining obscure documents to see the big picture where most investigators never even knew there was a frame. Part of what separates Barlett and Steele from Ph.D. economists looking at the same data is that the journalists find examples of real people to give abstraction flesh.