When Mark Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” in 1873, he captured something essential about post-Civil War America: a society that glittered on the surface while concealing profound inequalities and social dysfunction beneath. More than 150 years later, the metaphor has found renewed relevance. Today’s America bears an uncanny resemblance to that earlier era, marked by concentrated wealth, technological upheaval, labor unrest, and a political system seemingly captured by moneyed interests. Yet this new Gilded Age differs in crucial ways that may make it even more entrenched—and harder to reform—than its predecessor.

The disconnect between American prosperity and American precarity has never been more visible—or more vertiginous. As 2025 unfolds, Wall Street’s obsession with a handful of technology stocks has catapulted markets to dizzying new heights even as unemployment rises, wages stagnate, and inflation hovers at 3%. The stock market’s exuberance is real, but it reflects the fortunes of an increasingly narrow slice of society while masking the distress of everyone else.

One economist recently described the US economy to Bloomberg as a Jenga tower: a precarious structure increasingly dependent on the profligate spending of the rich while a growing number of Americans must choose between car payments and dinner. The data are sobering. The richest 10% of households now fuel almost half of total US spending, their consumption powered by stock portfolios that seem to defy gravity. Meanwhile, lower-income and middle-class families are pulling back, their budgets squeezed by higher costs of living and a grim, rising tide of mass firings.

This is not just a crisis of the poor anymore. In 2025, it’s the middle class, too—that broad swath of Americans who once formed the stable core of the economy—who find themselves in trouble. The disconnect makes the economy more susceptible to recession, more fragile, more unequal. And it makes the parallels to the original Gilded Age impossible to ignore.

The resemblances begin with the concentration of wealth itself. In the original Gilded Age, men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan accumulated fortunes that dwarfed anything previously seen in American history. Rockefeller controlled roughly 90 percent of U.S. oil refining at Standard Oil’s peak. Carnegie dominated steel production. Their wealth, adjusted for inflation, rivaled or exceeded that of entire nations.

Today’s tech billionaires occupy a strikingly similar position. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of others have amassed fortunes that would make the robber barons envious. Like their predecessors, they’ve built near-monopolistic control over critical infrastructure—not railroads and oil refineries, but digital platforms that mediate communication, commerce, and information itself. Amazon dominates e-commerce and cloud computing. Google controls search. Meta shapes social connection. Just as Standard Oil once determined who could transport goods to market, these companies now determine who can reach customers, what information people see, and how modern commerce functions.

The numbers tell a stark story. In 1913, near the end of the first Gilded Age, the top 1 percent of Americans held roughly 18 percent of national income. After decades of progressive reform and postwar prosperity, that figure fell to around 10 percent by the 1970s. Today, it has climbed back above 20 percent. The 400 wealthiest Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the population combined—a level of concentration not seen since the 1920s.

It is this concentration that now props up the entire economy. When the richest 10% account for nearly half of all consumer spending, the economic fate of the nation rests not on broadly shared prosperity but on the continued enrichment of those at the top. The stock market’s record highs translate into luxury purchases, high-end real estate, and conspicuous consumption that keep certain sectors humming. But this is a fundamentally unstable arrangement, one that leaves the vast majority of Americans as spectators to a recovery that never quite reaches them.

Both Gilded Ages emerged from technological revolutions that transformed how Americans worked and lived. The first was built on steam power, railroads, telegraphy, and industrial manufacturing. These innovations enabled unprecedented productivity but also disrupted traditional livelihoods, concentrating economic power in the hands of those who controlled the new machinery of production.

Today’s revolution is digital. Artificial intelligence, automation, and platform economics are remaking the economy with similar speed and similar effects. Manufacturing jobs that once sustained the middle class have given way to service work and gig employment. The workplace stability that defined the postwar era—steady jobs, pensions, employer-provided healthcare—has eroded into precarity. Uber drivers and DoorDash couriers are today’s equivalent of nineteenth-century pieceworkers, nominally independent but effectively controlled by algorithmic management, without benefits or job security.

The wave of mass firings sweeping through corporate America in 2025 represents the latest chapter in this disruption. Tech companies that spent years hiring aggressively are now shedding workers with brutal efficiency, optimizing for shareholder value while those laid off face tight job markets and stagnant wages. The irony is acute: the same technology stocks enriching the investor class are produced by companies that increasingly view labor as a cost to be minimized rather than a partnership to be sustained.

In both eras, workers organized to resist their diminishing power. The original Gilded Age saw bitter strikes—Homestead, Pullman, the coal wars—met with corporate violence and government suppression. Today’s labor struggles look different but carry similar stakes: Amazon warehouse workers seeking union recognition, tech company employees organizing over ethical concerns, gig workers fighting for basic employment protections. The tactics have evolved, but the fundamental conflict between concentrated capital and dispersed labor remains.

Perhaps the most disturbing parallel lies in the relationship between wealth and political power. The first Gilded Age was infamous for its corruption. Senators were openly described as representing not states but industries—the Senator from Standard Oil, the Senator from the railroads. Political machines traded government favors for campaign contributions. Regulatory agencies were captured by the industries they nominally supervised.

Today’s corruption is more sophisticated but no less real. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign spending, allowing billionaires and corporations to shape elections through super PACs. Lobbying has become a vast industry, with former members of Congress and their staff selling access and influence to the highest bidder. The revolving door between government and industry spins continuously, with regulators moving seamlessly to high-paying jobs at the companies they once oversaw.

Tech companies alone now spend hundreds of millions annually on lobbying and political contributions, dwarfing the budgets of consumer and labor groups. When regulation threatens their business models, they deploy armies of lawyers and lobbyists to water down or block reform. The result is a political system that responds with alacrity to corporate concerns while grinding slowly—or not at all—when addressing the needs of ordinary citizens choosing between car payments and groceries.

What makes the current moment particularly ominous is how visible the divide has become. In the original Gilded Age, the excesses of the wealthy were confined to certain neighborhoods, certain cities, certain spaces that the working class might never encounter. Today, inequality is algorithmic and ubiquitous. The same platforms that deliver news of mass layoffs also serve advertisements for luxury goods to those who can afford them. The same economy produces record stock valuations and record food bank usage.

This visibility breeds resentment but also resignation. When nearly half of all economic activity depends on the spending of the richest 10%, the message is clear: the economy is designed for them, not for you. Middle-class families pulling back on spending, lower-income workers juggling multiple jobs, recent college graduates facing a job market that promises credentials but delivers precarity—these are not temporary dislocations but structural features of Gilded Age 2.0.

The metaphor of the Jenga tower is apt. Each block removed represents another family dropping out of the consumer economy, another worker laid off, another small business closing. The tower grows taller and more unstable, its weight concentrated at the top, its base increasingly hollow. And everyone can see that it will eventually fall. The only question is when, and what comes after.

Yet for all these parallels, Gilded Age 2.0 differs from its predecessor in ways that make it potentially more durable and more troubling. The original robber barons built physical empires—factories, railroads, oil refineries—that were geographically bound and ultimately subject to national regulation. Today’s tech giants operate globally, their products are largely intangible, and their ability to shift profits across borders makes traditional regulatory approaches inadequate.

More fundamentally, the first Gilded Age’s titans produced tangible goods that other companies could, at least theoretically, compete to provide. Today’s platforms benefit from network effects that make competition nearly impossible. Facebook is valuable because everyone else is on Facebook. Amazon’s dominance grows as more sellers join its platform, which attracts more buyers, which attracts more sellers. These natural monopolies are harder to break up and harder to regulate than their industrial-age predecessors.

The information environment has also changed dramatically. The first Gilded Age’s reformers—muckraking journalists, progressive activists, populist politicians—could reach mass audiences through newspapers and magazines that, while imperfect, operated with some editorial standards and commitment to factual reporting. Today’s information ecosystem is fragmented, algorithmically manipulated, and polluted by misinformation. The platforms that could help organize reform movements also control what information reaches users, creating a conflict of interest that didn’t exist in the era of print journalism.

Perhaps most troubling, today’s Gilded Age exists in a context of diminished faith in collective action and government’s ability to solve problems. The original Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era and the New Deal—sustained periods of reform driven by broad coalitions demanding change. Those reforms worked, dramatically reducing inequality and creating the prosperous middle class of the postwar decades. But years of anti-government rhetoric, political dysfunction, and regulatory capture have left many Americans skeptical that government can effectively counter private power.

The original Gilded Age ended not through the benevolence of the wealthy but through sustained political pressure from labor unions, progressive reformers, and populist movements that built coalitions powerful enough to demand change. Antitrust enforcement broke up monopolies. Progressive taxation funded public investment. Labor laws protected workers’ rights to organize. Banking and financial regulation prevented the worst excesses of speculative capitalism.

A similar transformation is theoretically possible today, but it would require Americans to overcome some distinct obstacles. Effective antitrust enforcement must adapt to platform economics and network effects. Tax policy must address global capital mobility and sophisticated tax avoidance strategies. Labor law must extend protections to gig workers and independent contractors. Campaign finance reform must overturn Citizens United and reduce the influence of money in politics. And all of this requires building political coalitions strong enough to overcome entrenched opposition from those who benefit from the status quo.

The current economic fragility might paradoxically create conditions for reform. When the middle class joins the working poor in economic distress, the constituency for change grows. When even those with college degrees and professional credentials face precarity, the system’s legitimacy erodes. When an economy structured as a Jenga tower becomes too obviously unstable, even those near the top may recognize that their position is untenable.

Some signs of such organizing are emerging. Techlash sentiment has grown across the political spectrum. Union organizing is experiencing a modest resurgence. Progressive politicians have made inequality and corporate power central to their platforms. Young people, facing diminished prospects despite rising productivity and wealth, are increasingly skeptical of the economic system they’ve inherited.

But whether these nascent movements can build the kind of sustained, broad-based coalition necessary for fundamental reform remains uncertain. The first Gilded Age lasted roughly from the 1870s to the 1900s before reform began in earnest. The second has been building for more than four decades, since the late 1970s. How long it persists—and what kind of society emerges on the other side—depends on whether Americans can summon the political will to insist that an economy’s glittering surface be matched by substance beneath, that prosperity be broadly shared, and that democracy cannot be bought.

The first Gilded Age proved that extreme inequality and corporate dominance are not immutable features of capitalism but political choices that can be contested and changed. The question facing America in 2025 is whether that lesson from history can be relearned—or whether the parallels between these two eras will extend to another generation of exploitation before the Jenga tower finally topples and reform becomes unavoidable. The stock market may be soaring, but for a growing majority of Americans, the ground beneath their feet has never felt less stable.

Created in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.5