But ordinary people still had good reason to be terrified, just as ordinary people do today. Midwestern 1870's factory farms — thousand-acre spreads with 70-horse plowing teams — quickly dominated world markets but also wiped out the much smaller grain farmers of New York. Globalized grain markets were more volatile: good weather on the Russian steppes could ruin an American grower's year. Farmers found themselves caught in the coils of grain futures markets.

After the Civil War, artisanal local manufacturers usually enjoyed comfortable mini-monopolies. But with the rapid spread of the railroads and the telegraph, new department stores and mail-order catalogs pressured local producers and middlemen with mass-produced goods, a precursor to the Wal-Mart era. In the mid-1880's, the Bloomingdale's catalog promised that orders would arrive within two weeks in virtually the whole of the United States, including large swathes of territory reachable only by wagon-train a decade before. The productivity shock was comparable to that from the Internet in our own day.

Before the Civil War, America was perhaps the most egalitarian society in the world. But the unbridled entrepreneurialism of the 1870's gave rise to the robber barons. Even if ordinary people were doing better in the 1870's, the yawning gap between the very rich and everybody else fanned resentments. Interestingly, wealth inequality in today's America is roughly the same as in the Gilded Age.

The sharply increased social and geographic mobility of the 1870's set people adrift from traditional sources of security in families and villages. In our own day, the destruction of employer-employee relationships, the erosion of pension protection and employee health insurance may be creating a similar loss of moorings.

If one counts only the size of houses and cars, and the numbers of electronic gadgets stuffed into rec rooms, Americans are probably better off than ever before. But as the 1870's suggest, economic well-being doesn't come just from piling up toys. An economy has psychological or, if you will, spiritual, dimensions. A conviction of fairness, a feeling of not being totally on one's own, a sense of reasonable stability and predictability are all essential components of good economic performance. When they were missing in the 1870's, in the midst of a boom, the populace was brought to the brink of revolt.