This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A majority of Americans blame billionaires for the nation's ever-growing income and wealth divide. But economists Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar say there's a much larger but little-known cadre of very rich folks who may be even more important in closing the gap.
In a new book, "The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There," the pair dug through federal tax records to get a fuller, more precise picture of prosperity in the U.S. What they found was a large and hidden pool of Main Street millionaires. Most often, these are very successful local entrepreneurs who own ordinary businesses like gas stations, supermarkets, plumbing supply companies or car dealerships.
These "everywhere millionaires" collectively hold many times the wealth of the entire Forbes 400—and wield considerable political power. In this edited interview, Zwick, M.A., Ph.D., explains how this happened and what it can tell us about wealth and inequality in the nation. Eric Zwick: We define an everywhere millionaire as somebody who has a net worth of at least $5 million and has an ownership stake in a private business.
That's a really important part of their wealth. That definition applies to about 3 million Americans who, collectively, have an average wealth of around $25 million. If you add all their wealth up, it's more than 10 times the size of the Forbes 400 list in terms of their total wealth combined.
So, it's a much larger amount of resources we're talking about. Of course, individually, a typical one is not going to be as rich as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. But each of them is quite rich in the way that a normal person might think about what makes somebody really rich.
One is they are central characters in the story of rising income and wealth inequality over the last 40 years. If we look at the rise of the top 1% income share, which is one famous measure of what's going on with income inequality, more than half of the rise comes from income that flows through pass-through businesses to these private business owners. Elon has gotten really rich, and the Forbes 400 has gotten relatively richer, but they still just command a far smaller share of total resources.
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