There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America

In a fascinating discussion on the "Odd Lots" podcast, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal sat down with Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, authors of the new book "The Everywhere Millionaire." The conversation delved into the surprising realities of wealth distribution in America, challenging the common perception that the wealthy are solely tech billionaires or Wall Street titans. Zidar and Zwick's research, born from a unique project with the Treasury Department, reveals a vast, often overlooked segment of the rich: the owners of privately held, mid-market businesses across various industries.

The Genesis of a Novel Dataset

The journey to uncover America's hidden wealth began with a seemingly mundane, yet incredibly ambitious, project commissioned by the Treasury Department. Zidar and Zwick explained that the initial goal was to link disparate tax data – information about businesses, their owners, and workers – to better understand the impact of tax policy. At the time, the Treasury lacked the ability to connect these data points, making it difficult to analyze how changes to the tax code would affect different types of businesses, particularly pass-through entities.

"We started more than a decade ago, commissioned by the Treasury to go into the bowels of the Treasury and work with tax data to try and link all the businesses to their owners and workers because they didn't have the ability to do that, and they needed it to do tax policy," Zwick recounted. This foundational work involved sifting through old codebooks, deciphering variable names, and even tracking down the original architect of the IRS's XML system in a remote part of Utah. This painstaking process allowed them to build a comprehensive dataset that painted a far more nuanced picture of income, wealth, and entrepreneurship in the American economy than previously understood.