Earlier this spring, I finally got around to reading Wealth and Democracy, the seminal history of the American aristocracy by the author Kevin Phillips. The book traces the contours of our economic divide, from the rise of John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt at the dawn of the first Gilded Age to the expansion of the wealth chasm under their successors over the next century. But Phillips sent it to the printers prematurely: He published in 2002. I closed the book wanting to belt out some Hamilton: Just you wait, just you wait.
The Inevitability of the World’s First Trillionaire
Theodore Schleifer
August 25, 2021
