The Stealthy Middlegarchy: Who Really Holds America's Wealth? with Owen Zidar

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Audrey Damis as they chat with Owen Zidar, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs in the Princeton University Department of Economics and co-author of The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.

Zidar has spent much of his career studying inequality and tax policy through rigorous economic analysis. His latest book uses the groundbreaking administrative tax database that he developed with Eric Zwick to challenge the mainstream narrative depicting the distribution of wealth in America as a mirror image of the 19th-century Gilded Age. By examining the rise of pass-through businesses, the book highlights how a sizable class of private business owners were able to acquire substantial wealth while remaining beneath the public radar. 

The conversation explores how the dominant narrative surrounding wealth distribution in the U.S. today contradicts its actual abundance and dispersion. Zidar discusses previous gaps in tax data that limited economic research, the promise of socioeconomic mobility offered by business ownership, the means through which the “stealthy wealthy” yield economic power to exert political influence, and the overrepresentation of wealthy individuals in electoral office. He considers personal factors behind the dominance of a narrative portraying wealth as solely concentrated amongst the few tech billionaires of Silicon Valley, such as the discomfort that comes with examining your neighbor’s use of wealth to achieve political outcomes that might run contrary to the interests of the broad public.

Owen Zidar