December 24, 2003
The Second Gilded Age
Posted by
Mark Kleiman
Tom Spencer has a front-line report on the political psychology of the upper crust in a highly stratified society. It makes him think of the Gilded Age (his specialty as an historian) and of a Star Trek episode which I haven't seen but which from his description is derivative of the Eloi-and-Morlocks society of The Time Machine. Spencer's rather chilling account puts some social meat on the bare-bones statistics on inequality and mobility cited earlier in this space.
I must have done something really awful in a previous life to be condemned to live through both the Fourth Great Awakening and the Second Gilded Age. Perhaps I voted for Harding.
