This past week, as the world was made aware, the Chicago hedge fund manager Ken Griffin bought the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, a $238 million, 24,000-sqare-foot penthouse on Central Park South. What do you do with 24,000 square feet? You could hoard, presumably, and never require the advice of Marie Kondo, because who would ever notice that you hold on to all your old adapters and Ping-Pong balls? Each one of them could have its own guest wing.

The current taste for huge residential real estate and the fortunes that underwrite it have brought obvious comparisons to the Gilded Age for some time now. You can find some contemporary version of early 20th-century Newport, R.I., in many places. Under construction for 15 years, a house modeled after Versailles in Windermere, Fla., for instance, will be the largest in the country when it is finished, with 11 kitchens, five swimming pools and a 30-car garage.

It is easy to imagine that outsize American wealth always sought to express itself in immense square footage, but there was a protracted period in which aesthetics took a different course. In the years following World War II and for much of the mid-20th century, the consumption habits of the rich were guided by more modest ambitions. This happened to be a time when top marginal tax rates were high, at various points much higher than what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many on the left are proposing now. Between 1945 and 1980, those rates never fell below 70 percent and for many years they exceeded 80 percent.

As it happens, you can see the cultural transition from opulence to discretion unfold in the history of a single Fifth Avenue apartment: the 54-room penthouse triplex built for the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1925 (when, for what it’s worth, the top marginal tax rate was 25 percent). Post — who was already building the 126-room Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach — sold the mansion she had been living in to make room for the apartment building that would take its place, but she saw no point in sacrificing any of the luxuries and the accommodations to which she had been accustomed. The apartment still holds the record for one of the biggest ever built in New York.