Economics, like grey hair and cellulite, is slowly growing on me. A decade ago, I used to think that the “dismal science” was just that: boring, dry, and completely irrelevant to my life, unless I was demanding a beer and an economist was supplying one. But my interest in politics, and therefore economics, has evolved. So much in fact, that I recently found myself in packed auditoriums, paid ticket in hand, ready to hear a purveyor of the dismal science speak.
Of course, this wasn’t just any old professor of pie charts. This was Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton and a New York Times columnist who often opines about politics and economics (he has twenty books under his belt). The reason I went to go see Krugman is because I find his columns elucidating and spot-on, and because he was addressing an issue I believe to be of fundamental importance for the upcoming election. That issue is income inequality and the future of the middle class.
According to Krugman, the United States currently has one of the largest income inequalities in history. The middle class is shrinking, and our income distribution almost exactly matches what it was in the 1920s, when we lived in the so-called Gilded Age.
I was a little rusty on my economic history, so I had to remind myself what, exactly, this period in time meant.
After the Civil War, the oil, steel, and railroad industries exploded, creating a group of wealthy businessmen. With little government regulation, people like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, and a handful of others, got extremely rich, often at the expense of others. Wealth through exploitation earned these capitalists the name “Robber Barons,” a term that is now synonymous with questionable business practices. Mark Twain dubbed the nineteenth century the Gilded Age, referring to the wide displays of wealth glittering on the surface, with corruption and inequality lying underneath. When the then French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, visited the United States, he is rumored to have said that the nation had gone “from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence—without achieving any civilization between the two.”
