This blog accompanies Monica Prasad’s Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era article
Piketty and the Gilded Age

It is fashionable to ask if we are living in a “new Gilded Age.”  But we aren’t, and the reason for that is that the Gilded Age itself, and the progressive policies it led to, have made capitalism bearable for most who live under it.  For all the talk of the unfettered free market capitalism and the rise of inequality in the last several decades, conservatives have not actually managed to shrink the role of government—not to where it stood in the Gilded Age, not even to before the New Deal, not even to before the Great Society.  Because of this, many Americans, taking programs such as Social Security and Medicare for granted, identify their prosperity with the free market, and therefore with lower tax cuts.  The welfare state frees the middle classes to think about things other than economics.  Americans tell pollsters that they do not like inequality, but they do not vote based on that preference.  What concerns voters in the voting booth is absolute wage stagnation, not relative levels of income or wealth.  Until and unless the policies the Gilded Age and the next half century gave us are scaled back, we will not go back to either the extremes of desperation, or the conflict and progress, that came out of the Gilded Age.  This suggests a long-term political dynamic under capitalism that is worth considering even if the long-term economic dynamics are open: inequality may in fact rise in the long run, but inequality may mean less to voters if absolute income levels are also rising, and a core of welfare state programs prevents mass poverty and vulnerability.

Read Monica Prasad’s full article

Read all articles in the Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?

Main image: Shutterstock ID: 238811329 ‘This is not the New York Stock Exchange, it is the patronage exchange, called U.S. Senate’. Print satirizing the machine politics of the Gilded Age. Color lithograph, 1881.