Edited Transcript of Conversation Intro Hey everyone, this is Charlie Sabgir, director of Young Men Research Project and host of the Upswing Podcast. Today’s episode features a conversation with Eric Zwick, who I was able to catch right in the middle of his book tour blitz, and I’m very grateful I did because this was a really fun one. Eric is a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and alongside Owen Zidar, recently published The Everywhere Millionaire. I swallowed this book in a single gulp, listening to it all in a day, and I think that’s because it combines just about everything that I, like I think many of you listening, are interested in. A story about the American Dream, who it belongs to, how some groups can grasp it more easily than others, in part because of the ways in which the political and economic systems have been intentionally geared towards them, but ultimately how this dream is still achievable today. In our conversation, we talk about his book, but given that he’s been in just about every outlet and interviewed with podcasters much more pedigreed than me, we wanted to focus a bit more on the young men and Gen Z angle. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. And as always, feel free to reach out to me at csabgir@ymrp.org. Conversation Charlie: I’m here today with Eric Zwick, co-author of The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. Eric is a professor of finance and economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business, and you may have seen his book and research making the rounds. I admittedly listened to the entire book in a single day and found it really fascinating and kind of a departure from the way that we typically think about these debates around income inequality and economic opportunity. Before we dive in, could you first explain what an “everywhere millionaire” is, how many of them there are, and why we haven’t heard much about this group before? Eric: Yeah, so thanks, Charlie, for having me. I’m a great admirer of the work that you and Aaron and others have been doing on this project and looking forward to a nice conversation here. So the book, Owen Zidar, my co-author and I wrote on the Everywhere Millionaires. We use different names to describe them, but concretely, who we have in mind when we say an everywhere millionaire is somebody who has a net worth of at least $5 million, and they own a private business. They live all over the country. They run businesses across many different industries, many unglamorous industries. There’s a blue-collar element. There’s a skilled white-collar services element. But this is not just a tech and finance story. We think this group of people whose wealth is so dramatic and whose stories are actually quite compelling once you identify some of them is undertold because of our media environment, and I think this is a theme that comes up in a lot of the conversations you’ve had, is distorted by the way we get news and information in different ways. Whether it’s media, policy advocates, or journalists, what data do you have access to? It’s sort of what the algorithm provides, for where you can easily find people. Public Company CEOs. Those are public companies. You can find them very easily. Tech billionaires who run companies that have these platforms that we’re on every day, who themselves buy media companies to get even more notoriety than their businesses might give them. We have very easy access to them, more so than we would like, but that causes us to think that that’s the only rich person that’s relevant in society. And you add up all those tech billionaires, that Forbes 400 group, which includes a lot of finance people, hedge fund people, and some large public companies like the Waltons and so on. It’s like maybe four or five percent of household wealth. And so it’s just not even close to the majority story of household wealth. And even in the top one percent, it’s sort of a pretty small part of the story. But these everywhere millionaires, I think, are far more pervasive and deserve far more attention than they’ve received. Charlie: I want to return to this conversation of whether we should be focusing on the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world, but I want to start with what I think this book fundamentally gets to, which is the question about the American Dream and its viability today. In our May survey that we just completed of young men aged 18 to 29 in the United States, we asked three different questions about how young men think about the American economy today. The first option was, “I think the playing field in the U.S. is even today.” The second option was, “I think the system gives certain groups certain advantages when they’re born,” but that hard work still allows you to overcome them. And the final option was, well, I actually think this is a pretty even playing field. The most common answer was the middle choice. About half of young men overall said that they think some groups are born with some advantages, but that hard work still matters. Your book really digs into this question, talking about both the macro and the micro factors for how one becomes a mainstream millionaire. Could you quickly sum up what the true differentiating factors are, both at an individual and a societal level? Eric: Yeah, no, I think that’s a really interesting piece of evidence and suggests to me that the young men in the survey are pretty well calibrated to reality and maybe less so to the vibe that the system is totally rigged and hopeless, which I think emanates from both sides in certain respects of the political conversation. The stories we tell in the book are built on a decade of research using unprecedented administrative data where we had the ability to look at all the entrepreneurs that started companies in the U.S. going back to 2000. So it’s like 10 million founding events, 8 million people. There’s just like so much richness in this data. And you can kind of look at the successes. You can look at the failures. You can look at the sort of intermediate cases to try and tell a pretty comprehensive picture of what advantages certain groups have. And starting a business that ends up in, say, the top decile of the performance of businesses is an important path to upward mobility. It’s a much more common path than going to an Ivy League school, just like more people take that route, and it turns out to be quite effective. So I think the broader paths to real wealth in America are wider than the standard credentialed labor market story suggests. It’s not to say that doing well in high school, getting a good SAT score, going to a top college, and going to get a job in a top company is a terrible idea for somebody. But if you don’t end up on that track, I think there are actually a lot of opportunities available. And so I think some of the successes that we profile, and then the large data tells us, there’s this like “no mobility approach” to interpreting the opportunities of young men that are kind of too unfair. At the same time, if you’re born to high-income parents, you’re much more likely to get on that path to owning and running a business. Sometimes it’s through inheritance, although we think the typical top 1% business owner is not running a business that they inherited. Maybe three-quarters of them either started or bought a company. But if you are born in the top 1%, you have about six times the likelihood of starting a star company than if you’re born in the bottom third of the income distribution, in terms of where your parents were. So understanding those gaps and where the barriers are — this is a really important challenge for us going forward. But quantitatively, there are so many more people from that middle-income group that the typical star business owner actually comes from. Charlie: Yeah, I was really fascinated by the one finding about Salt Lake City being such a hub, and that Mormon imprin… Get full access to Young Men Research Project at ymrp.substack.com/subscribe
