To Gild or not to Gild? Revisiting the Transformations of American Capitalism

Abstract

In what sense are we living in a “New Gilded Age”? Facile analogies between the late nineteenth century and our own era have proliferated in recent years. Pundits such as Paul Krugman inserted this analogy into the public conversation in the early 2000s, drawing on empirical work by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. In underscoring a parallel between the two “gilded” eras, these commentators sketched out two periods marked by economic inequality, with several “anomalous” decades of relative equality in the middle of the twentieth century. This basic U-shaped narrative template has inspired commentators in numerous venues, from The Nation to The Economist, to imagine the shifts of recent decades simply as “a return” to an earlier age. Evoking social, political, and cultural resemblances, these accounts have stressed the resurgence of unfettered markets, economic volatility, government inaction, and the plutocratic reign of money.

Political contestation and the Second Great Divergence

“…Piketty's presentism raises analogous questions about the longstanding textbook convention of labeling the late‐nineteenth‐century United States the “Gilded Age.” 16 From a global perspective, the phrase reeks of parochialism, not least because, as one historian has observed, it perpetuates an antiquarian obsession with “old fables, cartoons, and personalities” (John, 2009; Livingston, 2016; Maggor, 2020: p. 282) 17 . It is one thing to disparage proprietarian capitalists and lament the “sacralization” of property, yet quite another to explain the wealth of nations 18…”