Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley want to change the world. The ones profiled in „The Everywhere Millionaire”, a forthcoming book by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, are different. They find something boring, often catatonically so, then pursue it with star-spangled doggedness until they become rich. A typical character sells gutters in Texas. Another distributes toilet paper in New Jersey. One woman in California began baking quiches for her own parties and simply did not stop. Two decades later she was making more than a million quiches a day and owned a yacht.
The authors are economists in the vein of their subjects. Messrs Zidar and Zwick, of Princeton and Chicago universities respectively, spend their days toiling in the thicket of America’s tax data. Much of their work involves untangling the effect of a 1986 law that cut the top rate of individual tax to below the corporate one. As changes to the tax code are wont to do, this brought about a vast reorganisation of American business. Private corporations were reconstituted as partnerships, sole-proprietorships and other structures which „pass through” profits directly to their owners, who then pay income tax.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
