The other part of the Long Depression that's frequently glossed over is the substitution effect. While prices <i>in aggregate</i> declined, some prices declined extremely rapidly while others (thanks to Baumol's Cost Disease) declined slowly or not at all. The resulting cost differential led to a fundamental change in the <i>structure</i> of society and its values.<p>What represents wealth in an agrarian society? Land, livestock, horses, slaves, servants, leisure time, and social connections. Many of these goods <i>increased</i> in price during the Gilded Age, or became impossible to obtain. No more homesteading the West, no more slave plantations, independent ranchers & farmers were driven out of business by the meatpacking & agribusiness industries, the domestic servant class largely disappeared.<p>But what happened, eventually, is that these definitions of wealth became marginalized in favor of ownership of new luxury goods. What represented wealth in the 1950s? Having an expensive car. Owning a house in the suburbs with electricity & running water, and a washing machine, dishwasher, and vacuum cleaner. Flying on jets. None of these even existed during the Gilded Age.<p>It's possible we'll see a similar resolution to the current crisis, where the expensive and un-automatable pillars of a middle-class existence - health care, education, housing - simply get marginalized as a backward remnant of a previous era, and new status symbols - perhaps control of virtual currencies, prowess in computer games, neural net uplinks, bionic implants - take their place.