The Family Edge

May 20, 2019
For those who want to start a successful business, their best bet is to get married and get busy procreating, says professor of entrepreneurship Dyer in this thinly conceived treatise. Dyer, who comes from a sizable family, hastens to assure readers that he doesn’t intend to shame anyone who’s not in a “nuclear” family—and then blithely proceeds to explain how some family structures are better than others, as (literally) illustrated by the public restroom-style male, female, and child icons used to depict the concept of “family” on the book’s cover. His basic point is that access to “family capital,” meaning the financial and social resources of one’s family members, makes starting a business much easier, with the text amounting to one long explication that “family capital is... society’s basic building block for wealth-creation and economic prosperity.” Dyer paints an alarmist picture of countries with low financial and family capital and bemoans trends in marriage, fertility, divorce, cohabitation, and “out-of-wedlock” birth and the rise of an “individualistic and narcissistic” culture. His shrill argument is unlikely to garner interest from anyone who doesn’t already agree with him, and offers little even to the choir to which he’s preaching.