The salient fact is that the Great Convergence during the middle decades of the twentieth century, which Kuznets celebrated as “the new normal” and that most senior citizens in the twenty-first century fondly recall as the Golden Age, was in fact an anachronistic interlude largely dependent upon government policies enacted during national and international crises, then continued by both political parties in the 1950s and 1960s. In effect, the New Deal and Great Society programs ameliorated the unequal impact of industrial capitalism on the distribution of wealth.
