Patrick Boyle on the Gilded Age -- a higher caliber of evil plutocrats

Patrick Boyle does keep at least a light thumb on the scale while making his case that the robber barons had a net positive effect on American—and to a degree, global—quality of life. His emphasis on men like Carnegie and Rockefeller, whose wealth primarily came from making products like oil and steel better, cheaper, and more widely available, and his omission of those like Stanford, whose fortunes owed more to stock manipulation than to innovation, certainly help support his argument.

He addresses—but arguably underplays—the collateral damage from some of the ruthless tactics the robber barons used against one another.

Nor does he argue convincingly against the counterfactual that many of these improvements could still have happened without these massive monopolies. Other industries, such as electricity and automobiles, were highly competitive, and that didn’t seem to slow their progress at all.

But even taking all those things into account, Boyle still tells a remarkably convincing story of capitalism mostly working like it's supposed to. It's an interesting tale, and he does a good job telling it, but the most striking aspect is the implicit but stark contrast between the super-rich of the Gilded Age and those of today.

For starters, while the robber barons may have been obscenely wealthy—beyond the dreams of avarice—by 21st-century standards they weren’t actually that rich, even when adjusted for inflation.

(Boyle argues that this may be understating the wealth of the robber barons, but his alternative metric is a bit unconventional and something to discuss another time.)

Even more notable is the difference in how the two groups made their fortunes. We shouldn't be too quick to dismiss the crimes and assorted offenses of the barons, but at the end of the day, they were all extraordinarily smart men who amassed fortunes over long careers based on enormously profitable goods and services.

Of those who became super-rich in the 21st century (as compared with a Gates or a Buffett), the only one who really fits the robber baron mold is our Lex Luthor, Jeff Bezos.

Enormous fortunes today are made almost entirely out of stock bubbles or by being in the right place at the right time when an industry spikes—often in the space of two or three years. The correlation between money made by companies and money made by CEOs and founders has almost entirely broken down. These days, it is not difficult to find plutocrats who are richer than most, perhaps all, of the robber barons, despite having never run a profitable company.