The current issue of the New Yorker carries a profile of the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman. Mr. Schwarzman’s $8 billion initial public offering payday and 60th birthday party last year, an understated and modest affair that the Wall Street Journal editorial page characterized as “garish,” were enough nearly to cause the restructuring of the entire American tax system.

The New Yorker article, by James Stewart, places Mr. Schwarzman, who lives on the Upper East Side among other places, in the context of “an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence” that took place as “the incomes of ordinary Americans stagnated or fell.” What is remarkable about the article is that it goes on to detail the way in which Mr. Schwarzman and his partner in the Blackstone Group, Peter Peterson, are themselves ordinary Americans whose extraordinary success underscores the opportunities available in America to those who work hard and take risks.

The New Yorker reports that Mr. Schwarzman attended public high school in a suburb of Philadelphia, where his father and grandfather ran a drygoods store. His mother grew up poor in the Bronx. The article recounts an audience Mr. Schwarzman had with W. Averell Harriman in which Harriman asked, “Young man, are you independently wealthy?” and Mr. Schwarzman replied, “No sir, I’m not.” Mr. Schwarzman, the article says, rose at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and worked until 10 p.m. He is married to the daughter of a New York City firefighter.

Mr. Peterson is described as a son of “Greek immigrants who ran a restaurant, where Peterson worked throughout his youth.” Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Peterson worked at Blackstone and built the company for 22 years before the liquidity event that came with taking it public. The firm was named Blackstone after the combination of the Yiddish Schwarz and the Greek word for stone, petros.

It will doubtless all strike some as tacky or nouveau rich. To us it represents the social mobility that is such a virtue of America and New York City. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was quoted in the Washington Post the other day asking “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation.” The New Yorker article describes Mr. Schwarzman snapping up residences once owned by Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and it describes how his own Blackstone stake, valued at $8.83 billion at the end of the initial day of the firm’s public trading, has sunk in value to $4.62 billion.

It’s enough to make one wonder what high school student of humble origins but exceptional promise will, in a generation or two, one day purchase and move into one of Mr. Schwarzman’s residences, buoyed by hard work and risk-taking, by the positive influence of immigration, and by the dynamism and innovation that are so characteristically American.