Donald Trump keeps prattling about how the Gilded Age from 1870 through 1913 was the richest era in US history. Why? Tariffs.
Nobody with a room temperature IQ should buy this obvious foolishness, but just in case you need evidence, here it is:
The most prosperous era in American history is . . . right now. We are ten times richer than we were during the Gilded Age.
You don't even need to bother engaging with women's disenfranchisement; Jim Crow; widespread poverty; poisonous food; rampant political graft and corruption; the Panic of 1873 and again in 1893 and yet again in 1907; child labor; and 12-hour workdays under foul conditions. Just forget about all that stuff. We were ten times poorer back then than we are today. That's enough to know.
I have no doubt that we are multiples richer, on the whole, than we were 80 to 150 years ago. Even 70 years ago.
However, I question the accuracy of inflation adjustments going back that far. It's kind of apples to oranges given how much life has changed and how much the economy has changed.
I have a hard time believing that life in the US was only about 25% as "rich" in the 1960s as it is today, or that we're only 40% "richer" (per capita) today than we were in the 1990s. If I had to pick in which time period the population of the US enjoyed broad-based prosperity (while still having massive and systemic inequities, and tons of people living in poverty) it would be one of those two: 60s or 90s. While that's not quite the same thing as all this inflation stuff, it's pretty close.
Of course, if you accounted for median instead of average in the GDP per capita (somehow... it's too late for me to go down that rabbit hole right now), the graph would be entirely different. GDP increases have been essentially captured only by the extremely wealthy in the last 20 years, and only by the upper classes in the last 50.
C'mon, man! Are you claiming only rich Americans have access to the vastly better treatments for disease we now have? Food is immeasurably better and tastier than years ago (how'd you like to have to make do with 1975's salads or sandwiches or coffee or beer?). Air travel used to be the preserve of only the affluent (the "jet set"). Cars are vastly safer. TV offerings are hugely richer and more varied. Youtube is free, and provides literally hundreds of thousands of videos worth of (free) content. Air quality is massively better. Crime is also lower. Even clothing is better and more comfortable. These improvements and innovations—and many, many more—are all available to the non-wealthy.
We have problems, sure (and how!)—and "material standard of living" very definitely is not a perfectly proxy for "happiness"— but broad-based living standards really are higher in the United States than even 30 or 40 years ago, and much, much higher than 60 years ago.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I would also suggest to pay for all what you have listed (that "all" I very much enjoy) has been converted into carbon and has been dumped into the environment.
+1
Yes. Humans have seldom been shy about fucking over the environment for more comfort. Sigh. Tragedy of the Commons is a very real things. But still...
Mind you, "higher standard of living" isn't synonymous with "better economy." And I think that's where the confusion/conflation flows from. There's a perfectly reasonable case that the economy of the 1990s or 1960s was better than today's, sure (though I doubt by much). But that doesn't mean living standards haven't risen. To put it more starkly, the economy of the 1930s wasn't as strong as the economy of the 1830s. But living standards (yes, even during the Great Depression) were a lot higher than a hundred years previous.
>> Air quality is massively better.<<
I grew up in the 60’s in Los Angeles. When I played a sport that you had to really exert yourself like basketball or track I would get a pain in my chest which I then attributed to the exercise. It was the smog. I also remember days when there would be a light breeze with clear air. Then the breeze would die down and the smog would roll in. Sometimes it was so thick you would think there was a fire.
Ah, the “good old days”.
Agreed. "The good old days," when rivers caught fire, when vehicle fatalaties were triple what they are today, when life expectancies were a full decade less, and when women were effectively barred from higher education and all the good jobs.
Good lord, I am sick of people talking about the 1960s as some sort of golden age.
I grew up in the 60’s in Los Angeles. When I played a sport that you had to really exert yourself like basketball or track I would get a pain in my chest..
Beijing resident enters the chat...
I'll never take clean air for granted again, that's for sure. It's a bitch trying to keep up with reasonable workout schedule.
I find poor air quality causes headaches, too, and lowers energy levels.
That is not at all what I'm suggesting. There ARE huge differences in quality of life - all those things you mention.
But just because the floor for quality has gone up doesn't mean that prosperity is shared as broadly as it was in the 60s or 90s (which, again, is not to say that it was fully shared).
And those improvements in the floor for quality can also cost more. Nowadays you pretty much must have a smartphone to meaningfully participate in the economy as an employee or functional adult. They cost multiples more. To wit: the cost of necessities is a higher share of median income now than it was in the past. We might look "richer" for it because those phones and cars are fancier and safer, but we're also poorer in other measures because there isn't as much left to go around to other needs and wants.
And nevermind the externalities to those improvements (climate change being the big one, but also things like SFH-exclusive zoning and the housing crisis).
I'll also note that this wasn't about living standards (or quality of life): it's about "richer" or not, and the point being made by Kevin is strictly about dollar signs. I was pointing out that we're not 10x richer, and we're probably not even as rich as we were in the recent past, because I agree with you (!) - it's not just about the dollar signs, it's about quality. And the mix of both of those things is worse today than it was 30 and 60 years ago.
"To wit: the cost of necessities is a higher share of median income now than it was in the past."
Not true at all. Food and clothing today cost much less, and are a much smaller fraction of household spending, than they used to be just a few decades ago.
It takes more than just food and housing to engage with modern life. Don't pretend I'm only talking about the literal biological necessities, because I'm very clearly not.
You say smart phones cost multiples more. Multiples more than what? You can get an adequate smart phone for a hundred dollars with a minimum "talk and text" service plan for ten or fifteen dollars a month.
Don't be dense - it didn't cost an entire two weeks' worth of gross pay to buy a phone in 1965. It cost about two days' worth. The monthly bill was also about 15 minutes' worth of work at minimum wage, whereas today it's at least 2 hours' worth for the most basic monthly service.
Yes, yes, phones do a lot more these days than be a phone (oftentimes, being a phone is one of the least used functions of it...) - but it still fulfills the same role, i.e. being how you connect with the world. All of these lifestyle improvements also come with additional costs.
Y'all are severely missing the point here. You all must be in the older generations and not have this lived experience?
Edit-after-edit-timer: my mistake on the 15 minutes' worth for the bill. That was if you paid for the phone as a rental on your monthly bill (similar to what ISPs do now with modems/routers). The monthly bill itself was in fact about 10-15 hours' worth of work at minimum wage. So, trade offs and time horizons: today's phones cost much more up front but the monthly bill can be cheaper (note that the non-economy versions of modern phone bills, i.e. Verizon, are still about 10 hours' worth of minimum wage work), whereas phones 60 years ago (and 30 years ago) cost much less to acquire the hardware and about 10 hours' worth of work for the monthly bill (this was also true in 1995 with minimum wage of $5.15 and basic monthly phone bills around $50).
In 1965 I couldn't buy a phone at all. All phones remained the property of the phone company and were provided as part of your basic line charge (and don't forget that free calling areas were smaller and long distance charges MUCH higher then). Assuming a $15/hr. minimum wage a cheap cell phone costs less than a day's pay; as I said, under $100, (I know this because I have one) and monthly service can cost less than an hour's pay.
We don't have a $15/hr minimum wage.
Yes, it's not just a question of monetary wealth, it's the whole picture of how enjoyable your life is and what you can do with it.
As a thought experiment - would you trade your life for that of the richest person alive in the 1870s, say Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller? Of course not!! As a middle class American with a decent income, I live better than those two could dream of. Sure they had lots of servants around, but there is only so much a retinue of servants can do.
They couldn't live in heated and air conditioned comfort like I do. They couldn't hop on a plane and be in Paris in seven hours like I can. They couldn't listen to any music they want or watch any entertainment they fancied at a few touches of a button. They couldn't communicate with their friends and loved ones any time they liked, like I can. And as for medical matters, I'll just say one word - antibiotics.
Oh Kevin, Trump couldn't care about per capita. Hearst could ship entire European castles to California, and Trump can barely afford a statue. America is obviously on its uppers.
But we need a TV in every room, a car for every driver, high-speed internet, at least 3 streaming services, etc....
1870 to 1913 was such a miserable time to be alive...see Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc, etc, etc. Crazy man Orange knows no history. Traveller
Yes. And note also the rise of socialist and communist movements throughout the country. The "per capita" was actually bestowed upon the gilded 1%, while the 99% struggled to just survive. Heck, even Jack London wrote a pro-communist novel. And was a big union organizer.
And yet it was probably a better time to be alive than a hundred years before that. Thing like a more reliable food supply and the beginnings of effective public health measures...
Unless you were a robber baron and that's definitely what Trump sees himself as. FFS, he named his damn kid "Barron."
Ah, but we're not richer in "status", are we? There are Uppity Women all over the place. Black guys make millions in entertainment, the NFL and NBA. A "sub-continental" is running the FBI, and the Canucks are even acting up!
Can a Red-Blooded Caucasian XY get some respect!?!?!
This is the key here. Kevins chart doesn't address the actual topic at hand.
Sure, line up with the other 10 sex gene combos (including XX) and have fun reading about trisomies, quatrasomies, pentasomies, and the one known monosomy (a single X gene - a single Y is non-viable), (via Genitics.org)
And wait till you get into variant expressions. Biology is not rocket science - it's way more complex.
To paraphrase Dean Wormer, stupid and incurious is no way to go through life, son. Unless, I suppose, you aim to be elected God Emperor of the stupid and incurious.
It's relative wealth that matters for these culture warriors.
American consumer culture asks how wealthy are you compared to your neighbors? The actual functionality of your car (actual wealth) doesn't matter as much as the brand name or label when it's compared to your neighbors car (relative weatlh).
Consumer culture isn't the only factor where relative wealth is the key.
American race and social heirarchy culture is the other critical area. How wealthy are you compared to those lesser people? The immigrants down the block, the black couple on TV, the lesbian couple you saw at the store....how does my wealth and income compare to these people who are BELOW me on the social structure? This is what matters.
For most voters, actual quality of life doesn't matter that much. If you question whether this is true, the existence and success of the GOP is all the proof you need.
“For most voters, actual quality of life doesn't matter that much.”
It will when the social security and Medicare checks stop flowing. Seniors vote and they lose their shit over either not happening they way they expect it to. I imagine the same will happen when military folks have “irregular” paychecks and loss of all the perks they “need” like cheap commissaries, daycares and VA hospitals.
Maybe, but this still seems like more of a problem of relative wealth and status.
If we all get a bit richer or poorer, most people don't care. If I get poorer and find myself living like those lesser people, that's a big deal.
Trump is appealing to a political party full of voters who think things are better in Putin's Russia than here - it's a totally delusional bunch. Russia's median wealth per adult is about $8600, putting it right between Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Whatever happened to that Feenstra family that moved from rural Canada to rural Russia to escape the gays? I wonder if they’ve rebuilt their wealth and lifestyle, or if they’re all still living 10 people to a bedroom.
Yeah, yeah, ten times, whatever. What matters is that it was the Gilded Age, meaning (1) a label and a slogan that Trump can remember and (2) wealth to the wealthy, the only people who count.
He's probably a fan of that bullshit show on HBO.
Whenever it comes up in my TV group, I post the pictures of breaker boys and children working in mills, and ask people where their ancestors were about then.
Of course Trump's grandfather was running a brothel in Alaska--truly a golden age!
My grandfather was born in 1875. He used to say, in a verra thick Scottish accent, that "the only good thing about the good old days is that they're gone".
Trump lives in a TV show. He thinks “the Apprentice” was real life. His cabinet choices demonstrate he is not hiring for skill but rather casting positions for a made for TV movie.
Oh come on. EVERYONE knows why they (the convicted orange melon, specifically) keep harkening back to the Gilded Age.
(1) That was the point in time when the GINI index was at or near the highest levels in American history, matching today.
(2) But unlike now, back in the Gilded Age, the rich were unfettered in both their ostentatiousness and ability to openly flaunt their wealth without fear of being targeted. Back in the Gilded Age, literally, gold-plated toilets. Today, just Trump.
How many rich people understand and appreciate artistic expression other than its market value or the price of access? That's the inherent irony of all those rich and wanna-be rich people wanting to buy an extracted piece of in-situ public art by Banksy.
Another statistic I look to when comparing time periods or countries is child mortality (deaths before age 5). It has been declining for a long time, but the chart I found showed the rate in the Gilded Age ranging between 200 and 350 per 1,000 births in the U.S. The rate now is below 6. Ah, the good old days, when the death of a few of your children was a commonplace thing!
KD:
"Donald Trump keeps prattling about how the Gilded Age from 1870 through 1913 was the richest era in US history. Why?"
Simple. Because in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment - allowing the collection of income taxes - was added to the Constitution.
Forget the tariffs. It's income taxes that Trump wants to eliminate (and substitute with consumption taxes). When tariffs fail to bring in enough revenue the conversation will shift to "what else happened in 1913 that ended the United States richest era?" and one answer will be income taxes started to be collected. Correlation is causation, right? (Fox News will say.) So get rid of income taxes and the country can get back to becoming prosperous.
Or so the MAGA logic will declare.
Even this doesn't adequately capture the difference in living standards. Think of the things we take for granted today that didn't even exist in the 1890's. I mean, they had to watch television by candlelight, fer gawd's sake!
Yeah, and they only had dial-up internet!
Powered by an orphan child turning a crank all day while you doomscrolled what passed for porn.
One thing that I like about Kevin's commentary is his repeated observation that, economically speaking, the majority of Americans have never had it so good.
Yet the majority of Americans have elected a fascist and fascist enablers. Unlike Germany in the 1930's ,we did not need an economic disaster for this to happen. I conclude that, somehow through the workings of personal psychology, increasing personal wealth predisposes people to fascist tendencies. Even more, it predisposes people to vote for stupid people, if they vote at all.
If Americans ever recover from their increasingly fascist-curious tendencies, it will be because of their coming education in the College of Hard Knocks.
"Yet the majority of Americans have elected a fascist"
Trump squeaked by with a plurality, not a majority. And he has underwater approval numbers. Nobody likes him. He's a weak man, and he can't get his agenda through congress.
Had Biden focused on crushing inflation instead of maintaining full employment, we'd all be reading thought-pieces in the NYtimes about how 6% unemployment is hamstringing the Harris agenda.
Fully agree that Biden made the right call and that because people are stupid the reward for good policy was getting his party booted, but it's very, very important that we not lend strength the narrative of Trump's inevitability by treating the idea that the majority of Americans are fascists as some sort of world-wearying truth. Because it ain't true.
Trump's unpopular. He's doing unpopular things. That's the truth.
OK, it was a near majority plurality. The sane candidate didn't do as well.
Yes, he is doing unpopular things. Ask him if he cares. He will tell you that this is fake news, and people love him.
"Nobody likes him."
I'd say that at least 1/3 of American voters like him, at a minimum.
"he can't get his agenda through congress."
I hope he doesn't, but I wouldn't bet a nickel against him. He got all his cabinet choices confirmed.
"it's very, very important that we not lend strength the narrative of Trump's inevitability "
You are asking me to self-censor myself. I don't play that game.
" the idea that the majority of Americans are fascists"
I never said that. I said that they were fascist-curious. What I will also say is that they are privileged, decadent people who take their good economic fortune for granted. So much so that they are willing to vote for a fascist,
Increasing personal wealth predisposes AMERICANS to fascist tendencies. FIFY
I demur. We did have an economic disaster. We called it The Great Recession. Those were hard, hard times. I think they cultivated a sense of betrayal among many, many voters. Obama turned to austerity, which may have got him a second term, but left voters feeling more betrayed.
AND, I also think that we are in an information war, and that many people have been activated and polarized by a very long, expensive campaign. Maybe more than one. The Internet Research Agency is real. Do you think they shut down because there were a few articles about them?
If you search on "disinformation for hire" you will find a fair bit of reporting around the idea that there are commercial firms out there that specialize in spreading lies. Some of those lies are quite interesting. The Internet Research Agency is not the only organization doing this kind of thing.
This whole culture of so many believing comfortable lies reminds me of events leading up to the 08 meltdown. Investment banks ignored Burry’s uncomfortable truth and kept deluding themselves that subprime loans would work out.
So if Dems do win in 28, like 20 years prior they’ll discover they’ve inherited a financial and constitutional mess created by the outgoing crew who will walk away with millions (billions?) and not even be charged.
deja vu all over again? Possible, but my money is still on Oligarchy to Autocracy. Ignore the distractions folks, watch for legislation touting “improved security of voter registration and counting” jmho ymmv
Not everyone has benefited from the increase in GDP, at least since about 1972. Wages did keep up with GDP before that, but have not increased since then:
https://www.skeptometrics.org/WageIndex.png
So does this mean that the golden age for workers was in the Nixon administration? A number of things changed about that time, but it was basically the end of the New Deal/Great Society era and the start of the Voodoo era in economics. This didn't happen because white workers suddenly became advocates of plutocracy or oligarchy, but because the Republican party switched to support of White Supremacy.
The above wage index is from the Economic History Association (eh.net) but you can see how real production worker wages peaked in 1972 with the data at FRED:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1DVc7&height=490
Wages stagnating after 70s? imo the progress of wage stagnation nicely matches Wall St’s takeover of congress.
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Around the 70s most Dem campaign $ was from unions, GOP’s from Wall Street.
In 90s campaigns were too expensive for unions so Wall Street began funding both sides of the aisle.
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by the 2000s Abramoff testified K-St wasn’t just “asking for favors”, they were writing the whole bill, with directives to the congressmen- “Don’t touch a thing” !
"If only (they urged) the Industrial Revolution were allowed to work itself out unhindered, the total wealth of Society would be so vastly increased that the workers themselves could not fail to obtain a handsome share of this well-earned increment ; and, when once the spoils of Man’s conquest of N ature had been gathered in and divided out, then the temporary inconveniences with which the first and second generation of urban industrial workers had been required to put up would be compensated a hundred-fold by the solid comfort in which the third and fourth and subsequent generations would live happily ever after."
Best of health to ya KD!
The supposedly all wise and all knowing American public need to get Trump 2.0 right between the eyes. Because they'll never realize what they've done until it confronts them right in the face and becomes a mirror of their own ugliness staring right back at them to ask the question [i]Is the America you really want?[\i]. Only them can the Dems be competitive and win elections, not in blue states, but everywhere.