I wouldn’t call it a gilded age because it’s not even pretty to look at. Superyachts are fucking ugly and none of the billionaires have any sense of taste or style.
I can confirm this. My job is building captains chairs for yachts and some of the shit that rolls through here is just like… Do you have eyes?
If you dress terribly and the clothes cost 20$ you are an uncultured peasant. If you dress terribly and the clothes cost 20,000$ you are a sophisticated eccentric who redefines the boundaries of fashion.
When fucking Fortune magazine is calling out late-stage capitalism, you know we’re in trouble.
Here’s a crazy thing.
Watch an old movie with a super rich character and look at how poor they seem.
In 1973’s ‘The Mackintosh Man’ the baddie is a British lord, one of the richest in England. His yacht looks like a tugboat compared to today’s superyachts.
Hell, In ‘Batman and Robin’ billionaire Bruce Wayne has a mere three dozen cars.
Fuck billionaires and all, but I think two things are wrong with this.
First, comparing hollywood to real life. They were making super yachts in the 1800s. El Mahrousa was built in 1865 and still in the top 10 in size.
But those megayachts sre super unnecessary and terrible for enviroment.
Secondly, times just generally changed. Poor people shifted a lot too. 1970s poor was a lot more poor than modern poor generally.
But we should still fix the system that fucks over thr majority.
You’re completely wrong about the idea that people who were poor in the 1970s were worse off than people today.
Hunter Thompson’s book, “Hell’s Angels” has a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1972. A biker could work for six months as a Union stevedore and earn enough to hit the road for two years. A part time waitress could earn enough to support herself and her musician boyfriend. A kid who graduated high school and got a minimum wage job could rent a one bedroom apartment and party and still put money in the bank.
And don’t say that today’s tech is much better unless you can prove that real wages dropping resulted in the creation of the internet.
But would you consider that poor then? Maybe money was easier to obtain, but starvation/malnutrition rates have constantly been on a steady decline until the last few years. Not often you see people using a burlap sack to cloth their families, child labor, things like that. And we do have a lot of social programs like SNAP that didnt exist pre-1970s.1980s had the Homeless act. The world has changed drastically in the last 50-100 years.
But I guess you could make solid arguments that the economy is generally harder now, so its worse for the majority, incuding the poor.
