Owen Zidar

Sixty-seven point six five percent said big tech, banks, and big oil.

Why would you think otherwise? I would think otherwise because yesterday I had Eric Zwick on the program, Eric Zwick having just released a book co-written with Owen Zidar titled The Everywhere Millionaire.

And as I said yesterday to Eric Zwick, I remember thirty years ago, thirty years ago being excited about a book called The Millionaire Next Door.

And the premise of The Millionaire Next Door was that the people you might think have money in your neighborhood, the doctor, the lawyer, the owner of the accounting firm, well, maybe they do, but don't overlook the drywall contractor and the roofer and the trash hauler.

And so the, there still are just a ton of opportunities and there are a lot of opportunities that are sort of off the beaten path, um, in these unglamorous, uh, industries and occupations that I think we don't wanna forget, uh, them because they're gonna continue to be important going forward.

You, um, you have an interesting story to tell in the sense that your, your, you and your co-author, Owen Zidar, who, uh, got his, uh, PhD from Berkeley, you got yours from Harvard.

Owen now teaches at Princeton, you're at Chicago.

You began all this, is it fair to say, um, at the US Treasury Office of Tax Analysis when you worked as unpaid analysts, uh, when you were in finishing grad school.

I wouldn't necessarily say, well, the American dream is alive, and so these p- this is the path to the ultimate happiness.

This is the path to income, wealth, and that kind of prosperity, and those things are correlated with happiness, but there's no guarantee there.

As I said earlier, you went to Harvard, you teach at Chicago, your coauthor, uh, Owen Zidar, uh, went to Berkeley, now teaches at Princeton.

So you cover that elite gamut.

Think the owner of a local construction company, or maybe someone who owns a chain of restaurants.

That's according to a new book by economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick.

They trace this phenomenon back to tax code changes starting in 1986, which made it easier to pay lower taxes as a private business owner.

So what has that meant for our economy? For more, let's bring in Zwick and Zidar.

Like, how do we get more people onto an upward mobility ladder? Well, we should, you know, probably make sure that the opportunities are available to go down these paths.

And if we want to solve some of our fiscal problems, we need to maybe broaden the aperture of what we're looking at beyond just a wealth tax on a few billionaires.

Eric Zwick is a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Owen Zidar is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton.

Their new book is The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.

And as it turns out, these folks actually hold the majority of wealth in this country.

Professors Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar have written a new book about this.

It's called The Everywhere Millionaire, and they both join me now for more.

Welcome.

And what wasn't really talked about was on the other side, there was about a trillion dollars of cut in the form of preserving this 20% deduction, as well as continuing to erode the estate tax system.

We need tax revenue as a country, and I think one reasonable step is to kind of ask very wealthy business owners to pay something closer to what ordinary salaried workers, uh, like us pay.

Owen Zidar is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, and Eric Zwick is a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Thank you so much.

they just published a book called The Everywhere Millionaire.

Eric Zwick of University of Chicago and Owen Zidar of Princeton University.

It's the clearest X-ray yet of US wealth that's ever been taken.

These guys found that three million Main Street millionaires in the US are worth an average of $25 million each.