마크 트웨인의 '도금시대'와 폴 크루그먼의 '신도금시대'

Mark Twain's 'Gilded Age' vs. Paul Krugman's 'New Gilded Age'

Mark Twain, a novelist representing the late 19th century American literature, and Paul Krugman, a modern-day Nobel laureate economist, are widely different from each other in many respects. Therefore it appears that one cannot find any kind of similarity between them. But they share one important characteristic in that they are witnesses of the periods in which distributional inequity rose to its highest levels in American history. The late 19th century, which Twain named the 'Gilded Age,' was a period when a new class of industrial captains amassed huge amounts of wealth while a vast majority of farmers and laborers were alienated from the fruits of economic development. Twain was a harsh critic of the rampant materialism and political corruption of his time. However, due to his contradictory attitude, Twain seems to have failed to raise fundamental questions about social Darwinism which largely supported the social and economic order of the Gilded Age With the coming of the New Deal in the 1930s, the gap between the rich and the poor began to narrow and the trend of equalization seemed to take root. Around the end of the 1970s, however, the trend of equalization suddenly came to a halt, and inequality in distribution began to surge at an alarming speed. Soon the degree of inequality went back to the level of the Gilded Age, and Krugman declared that American society had entered the period of the 'New Gilded Age.' Krugman and many critics point out that the long reign of the Republican Party is the main cause of the advent of the New Gilded Age. One may ask whether it will be possible to see the trend of rising inequality reversed in the near future, but such a prospect does not seem likely.