Gilded Age levels?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Gilded Age levels?

Now they’re back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

- The Death Of Horatio Alger, by Paul Krugman, The Nation, January 5, 2004.

2. Wouldn’t it be nice to have lived in a time when you didn’t have to worry about global warming, bullying, airport searches, gas prices, acid rain, PCBs, the obesity epidemic or high cholesterol?

In fact, if you lived from the end of the 1800s to the early 1900s, such concerns would have been furthest from your mind. You’d have far greater concerns because the “good old days” of the so-called Gilded Age and the Gay Nineties, were good for the privileged class but meant severe hardships for most.

Those faraway times are chronicled in a magnificent book titled “The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible!” by Otto L. Bettmann.

Bettmann began collecting prints and photos as a boy in Germany and earned a doctorate at Leipzig University. He was curator of rare books in the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933.