The story of the Gilded Age goes something like this: robber barons got obscenely rich, workers were exploited, and inequality soared. You can find that story in history books, TV shows, and political speeches.
But what if that narrative is completely wrong?
Welcome to Episode 9 of From Ideas to Innovation. I’m sitting down with a good friend and collaborator, prolific economist, and professor at George Mason University to discuss his upcoming book, The Great Enrichment. Vincent Geloso takes on one of the most contested periods in American economic history, arguing that what actually happened was almost the opposite of what we’ve been told.
This is one of the most intellectually fun conversations on this podcast. Buckle up and get ready to shift the way you’ve heard the historical narrative.
About This Episode’s Guest
Vincent Geloso didn’t dream of being an economist. He planned to study art history — until his father pointed out the distinction between a hobby and a job.
So he started by dabbling in politics, landing a summer internship in the Canadian Prime Minister’s office in Ottawa as one of the very few French-speaking Conservatives from Quebec. He tried journalism next. Neither stuck.
Then, in the final year of his undergraduate degree at the University of Montreal, he took a class he’d been avoiding: Leonard Dudley’s Economic History of the Western World. A quarter of the way through the semester, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
Since then, Vincent has built one of the most prolific careers in economics, with over 120 peer-reviewed papers on topics spanning economic history, inequality, public choice, and social mobility. He has written on everything from the economics of lobotomies to why lighthouses aren’t public goods. As a professor at George Mason University, he is one of the most distinctive voices in his field — a true economic historian who can speak both the language of an economist and that of a historian.
His upcoming book, The Great Enrichment, is the culmination of years of research into what actually happened to living standards in America from 1865 to 1945 — and why the standard account gets it so badly wrong.
What You’ll Take Away
How to do economic history well and how to avoid the most common mistake people make when they look to the past to make present-day arguments
Why both the popular and academic accounts of the Gilded Age are wrong — and what the data actually shows about who benefited from that era’s growth
The difference between income inequality and living standards inequality, and why that distinction completely changes the story
How the experiences of Black Americans in that period demonstrates the power of markets to mitigate even the most severe legal and social discrimination
Who Peg Leg Williams was and how he made labor markets more competitive
Why the U.S. has a smaller welfare state than France, and what that tells us about the relationship between growth and poverty reduction
Who would make it on Vincent’s Mount Rushmore of economists
Cross-Sector Connection
We can’t make decisions for the future if we don’t properly understand the past. Vincent brings up great points about how we are mistaken when we attempt to study the past but bring with us our current-day reference points.
There were plenty of insights in understanding the past that will impact the three main disciplines I’m hoping will connect and have more discussions.
Researchers and academics will learn well from Vincent’s model for studying economic history. He points out that a common mistake in research is expecting the past to look like a backward version of now. That anchoring bias distorts everything from inequality measurement to policy evaluation.
Policymakers are currently navigating a landscape where inequality is one of the most politically charged topics in American life. Vincent’s book is a direct challenge to the Piketty-style framing that dominates that conversation. If our popular account of the Gilded Age is wrong — if markets were actually a powerful egalitarian force rather than an engine of exploitation — that has direct implications for how we design policy today.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs will find a compelling counter-narrative to the "robber baron" story. Vincent's research demonstrates that the firms and innovators of that era improved the lives of the poorest Americans through competition, innovation, and open markets. It's a story today's business leaders should be telling, because they're continuing that same tradition of creating opportunity through enterprise.
Final Thoughts
I was struck by Vincent’s framing of markets as an egalitarian force. Not despite their impersonality, but because of it.
Markets don’t care where you came from or who your parents are. They care whether you can produce value for someone else. And in a world with low friction, where people can move between industries, between cities, between opportunities, that impersonality becomes one of the most powerful engines of upward mobility.
This kind of argument only becomes visible when someone like Vincent spends years in the archives, unshackling themselves from the present long enough to see what was actually there.
And these findings matter for today’s discussions on poverty, as others submit blueprints that would cause more harm than good. You can read my thoughts on one such proposal over at Debunking Degrowth.
Next Time…
I hope you’ll tune in for my next conversation with Kerianne Lawson Rubenstein, a sports economist and Assistant Professor of Sport Analytics at Syracuse University. I’m really looking forward to our discussion!
In the meantime, please subscribe and share the episode with a colleague who will find the topic interesting.
