(And it's something that's been there since I was a doctoral student. To give a minor example, there were some well-known computer user satisfaction measures nearly everyone in MIS knew and used. I was developing other measures (not that particular construct), and it would have been much easier on me to go with the flow, analogously use the methodology for developing and validating my own measure. But once I really started looking close up and saw what was behind the makeup, I couldn't and adapted methodology from reference disciplines. I later tried to publish some criticisms in a peer-reviewed journal article, and it was rejected with personal attacks, no doubt by those with a vested interest in the criticized measures. It was corrupt, but I had a clear conscience.)
So when someone rebuts a tweet using a trite review of the Gilded Age, you earn my contempt. For one thing, I already know the standard discussion. A truly educated person does not simply read a script uncritically but will question assumptions, will consider contrary evidence. My views, for example, on the Civil War and war against Japan (including the use of atomic weapons), not to mention my perceptions of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, have seriously changed.
Let me summarize some of the criticisms:
- one decided to challenge my praise of the Gilded Age's robust economy, with a trite "progressive" description the era of unfettered laissez faire predatory capitalism, monopolists and robber barons. Now I'm not going to engage in a long, dry academic discussion; I just want to make some key points:
During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidlyThis emerging industrial economy quickly expanded to meet the new market demands. From 1869 to 1879, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for NNP (GDP minus capital depreciation) and 4.5% for NNP per capita. The economy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of 3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled. The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force. The average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women, and children) rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48%. By the beginning of the 20th century, gross domestic product and industrial production in the United States led the world. Kennedy reports that "U.S. national income, in absolute figures in per capita, was so far above everybody else's by 1914." Per capita income in the United States was $377 in 1914 compared to Britain in second place at $244, Germany at $184, France at $153, and Italy at $108, while Russia and Japan trailed far behind at $41 and $36.
Gaudy tales about these few unprincipled buccaneers distract our attention away from the millions of Americans on the farm and in the workshops. These hard working people constituted the real American economy during the Gilded Age. This bustling, surging economy of ours received immigrants from Europe at a rate of about a million a year, and it absorbed them on our farms and in other places of work. The standard of living was rising all the while; wages doubled between 1870 and 1900.
It was an age of invention. During the eighty years from 1790 to 1870, the U.S. Patent Office had granted just over 40,000 patents; during the next thirty years it granted just over 400,000. New types of farm machinery transformed agriculture. To cite one instance: not one bushel of wheat had been raised in the Dakota Territory before 1881; by 1887 its wheat crop was sixty-two million bushels. In 1870 there was nothing that could be called an American steel industry; by 1900 we were producing more than ten million tons of steel annually—more than all the rest of the world combined.
Now make no mistake: there was a lot of crony capitalism during this era (including the railroads), but far from laissez-faire capitalism, this involved things like special-interest favorable regulations and/or subsidies. John Rockefeller reduced the price of kerosene from 26 cents per gallon in 1870 to under 6 cents in 1897, which surely made the consumer better off--none of this "progressive" bogeyman of raising prices as he grew Standard Oil's market share.
- Another troll dismissed American growth as unexceptional, noting the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies and arguing this was little more than a normal progression from an agrarian to a more industrialized economy.
I'm not going to get into the debate on the populations of India and China, but for the sake of argument, let's say roughly 1.3B people each. Now that's more than 400% for each nation over the US. But the US with about 4% of the global population produces roughly 20-25% of global GDP. I will say this: yes, their economies have grown by liberalization. But to give the example of one index of economic freedom, the US ranks 17 while China is ranked 111 and India 143. China continues to be hobbled with a geriatric Communist leadership with their infamous 5-year plans, state-controlled banks (many of them zombies). You still see enormous government sectors in each country, with (despite heavy numbers of engineers) limited world-leading innovations in higher value markets like high tech and biotechnology. Much of their economy is focused on exports and economies of scale with existing technology. As for this transition to a more industrialized economy, easier said than done. There are scores of nations trying to do the same.
