I had no understanding that a small number of billionaires owned the majority of America’s wealth, in part because I was young and naive, but also because the American economy had shifted drastically between 1980 and 2010. Technological advances combined with late twentieth-century deregulation and deindustrialization created something like a second Gilded Age, with changes that I was too young to fully understand while still in grade school and too young and perhaps self-absorbed to realize in the first years of college.
