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EZ Eric Zwick On The Pie: An Economics Podcast

“A quarter of members of Congress are business owners. If you want to add the lawyers who own law firms or own their own practice, … gets closer to 40, 50%, which is kind of a nuts number if you think the base rate in the population is like less than 5% who are business owners. On the Ways and Means Committee, which is the chief tax writing committee in the House of Representatives, there were 40 members. There were three car dealers.”

The Pie: An Economics Podcast · October 2026

“A quarter of members of Congress are business owners. If you want to add the lawyers who own law firms or own their own practice, … gets closer to 40, 50%, which is kind of a nuts number if you think the base rate in the population is like less than 5% who are business owners. On the Ways and Means Committee, which is the chief tax writing committee in the House of Representatives, there were 40 members. There were three car dealers.” — Eric Zwick, The Pie: An Economics Podcast

Zwick explaining the term "middlegarks", the oligarchs of the middle. His point is that these millionaires are spread across every congressional district and write the rules both through lobbying and by holding office themselves.

The Pie: An Economics Podcast · 2026-10-13 Listen to the episode → More from Eric Zwick →

Transcript

The Pie: An Economics Podcast Around 46:07 into the episode
Tess Vigeland

You've coined this term for this group as a whole, middlegarks. Love that. The oligarchs of the middle, a bit of a Tolkien joke. Unpack that for us. What makes them a distinct kind of political actor

Speaker 3

as opposed to just rich people who vote?

Eric Zwick

…for all the members. So it's not just a few people that can write the rules. It's this much broader class of people. And they write the rules through lobbying. They also write the rules through becoming elected officials. So a quarter of members of Congress are business owners. If you want to add the lawyers who own law firms or own their own practice, so sort of equity owners in a law law firm, gets closer to 40, 50%, which is kind of a nuts number if you think the base rate in the population is like less than 5% who are business owners. On the Ways and Means Committee, which is the chief tax writing committee in the House of Representatives, there were 40 members. There were three car dealers. That's like crazy, you know, disproportionate representation. If you go below federal level to state and local level, often these elected officials, this is part-time work. It might not be compensated at all in a lot of states or localities or compensated very poorly. So who can afford to do that? Who has the flexibility and their job to do that? And who might have a vested interest in doing it…

Tess Vigeland

People keep calling this a second Gilded Age, right? And you really push back on that framing in this book. And yet we're talking about a lot of very, very, very wealthy people, even if they're not Bezos Musk wealthy. Why doesn't the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller comparison hold up?

Eric Zwick

So I think that Gilded Age metaphor or idea really conjures this image of a small number, much smaller number of maybe very powerful industrialist monopolists that are occupying positions of power and throwing around ungodly amounts of wealth to get what they want. So the Rockefellers, the…

Tess Vigeland

Even if it might feel like it.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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