From two leading economists comes a portrait of the hidden fortunes of Main Street business owners―ordinary Americans who built extraordinary wealth and are quietly rewriting the rules of money and power.
[A] brilliant new study ... Zidar and Zwick have some suggestions for how to change this. You might expect them to emphasize access to capital and to higher education, especially for the minority groups they show to be underrepresented among Main Street Millionaires. Instead, they stress connections, networks, and early exposure to entrepreneurs. With starting a business, as with so much else, seeing someone do it makes you likelier to do it yourself ... In the short term, the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done. I suspect we will be hearing much more about their work and its implications.
Zidar and Zwick upend the consensus on wealth inequality in America. Yet their sobering conclusions aren’t enough to exorcise the authors of their Mammonism ... Zidar and Zwick tell this story with admirable clarity and precision. Careful, quasi-scholarly language is supported by a rear guard of figures ... This style can be bland at times, but it’s a testament to the authors’ expository finesse that they manage to make fiscal history occasionally gripping ... But the book eventually drifts away from dispassionate analysis toward what can only be described as capitalist pablum ... The moment they pick out some particular millionaire, they become so dazzled by their well-heeled specimen that one begins to suspect their real sympathies lie with capital.
