‘The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There’ by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick
“When we talk about wealth, mainly we talk about billionaires,” said John Lanchester in The New Yorker. “But what if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively 13 times richer than the Forbes 400?” In their “brilliant” new study, economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick call attention to America’s Main Street millionaires, in particular the roughly 3 million owners of private businesses whose household net worth is at least $5 million. These are often stealth magnates—car dealers, beverage distributors, partners in law firms or medical practices—and they tend to have amassed their wealth through sustained hard work. “Unfortunately, there is a shadow side,” because they’ve also been so effective at wielding political clout that they’ve helped make life harder for many Americans. For now, “the best we can probably do about this concentration of wealth and power is to see it and name it, and that’s what Zidar and Zwick have done.”
The authors’ “eyeopening” account traces the rise of everywhere millionaires to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, said Greg Rosalsky in NPR.org. The bipartisan congressional bill cut tax rates, setting the top individual tax rate lower than the corporate tax rate. This triggered an explosion of so-called pass-through businesses, which pass profits directly to owners, who in turn pay taxes on that income at the lower rate. In 1980, pass-through businesses were small potatoes. “By 2011, they were generating more income than all traditional U.S. corporations combined—and accounting for most of the rise in the share of income flowing to the top 1%.” Zidar and Zwick, who identified this new millionaire class by diving deep into IRS records, have now attached their findings to “a colorful cast of characters,” including Chicago hot dog king Dick Portillo and other gogetters who started with nothing and made fortunes on surprising long-term bets.
“Zidar and Zwick tell this story with admirable clarity and precision,” said Nico Taylor in The Baffler. Though their “quasi-scholarly” language “can be bland at times,” it’s “a testament to the authors’ expository finesse that they manage to make fiscal history occasionally gripping.” Their book will be “of great interest” to readers who believe the rich now have the system rigged, said The Economist. As the authors point out, many everywhere millionaires enjoy the same luxuries as billionaires without attracting negative attention, and meanwhile they win new tax breaks and push through regulations that limit competition in their fields, including real estate sales, medicine, and law. But as critical as the book can be of millionaires, it “will appeal even more to those who hope to join their ranks.” Clearly, “much of the spoils of capitalism are still won by those who roll their sleeves up,” and “that is a great thing.”
‘The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia’ by Robert Kolker
Robert Kolker’s latest book “reads like a medical detective story,” said Carissa Wong in New Scientist. In a family of nine brothers and sisters, one after another of the siblings began exhibiting dramatic personality changes shortly before or after reaching the age of 40. Those afflicted became both apathetic and unable to read social cues, making them unrecognizable even to their spouses. Years passed before doctors solved the mystery, first attributing the behavioral changes to frontotemporal dementia (FTD), then linking that rare condition to a genetic mutation. But especially for anyone grappling with dementia in any form, there’s far more to The Vanishing Family than its initial mystery. “It is a tale of enduring love and devastating grief. It also offers a window into the neuroscience that could one day deliver a cure.”
Kolker, to his credit, “has written the biography of a family, making sure that each member is memorialized,” said Jennie Erin Smith in The Wall Street Journal. The siblings’ mother had FTD first, but her behavioral changes were attributed to alcoholism, and she died at 62 before anyone suspected otherwise. Christy, the first sibling to experience symptoms, was not yet 40 when, in the mid-1990s, she was dismissed from her executive position and soon after lost her husband and all interest in her children. The family’s story is mostly told from the perspective of Barb, the youngest sibling, who pushes for answers but puts off obtaining her own genetic test results. Kolker, author of the 2020 best seller Hidden Valley Road, once again proves to be “a keen interpreter of the science and subjective experience of mental illness.”
“For Kolker, the slipperiness of identity has been a recurrent theme,” said Julia M. Klein in The Atlantic. Here, he forces us to consider whether any of us have a fixed personality if FTD or Alzheimer’s can rewire it. Even so, his greatest achievement is “once again reportorial,” because “he has persuaded nearly every family member, the sick and the well, to confide in him.” His findings belie his book’s title. As healthy siblings care for the afflicted, the sprawling family “becomes, if anything, more unified— bonded, however imperfectly, by love.