Without the financial crisis, the trends that were increasing income inequality might have led to some kind of political backlash. But trends often need a crisis to bring them to the forefront of people’s minds. That’s one of the lessons of history: trends, if they unfold over decades, don’t necessarily produce big political outcomes; there needs to be some kind of catalyst.

In 2008–09, we had the biggest financial crisis since 1929. It was perfectly clear at the time—and I remember writing this in early 2009—that there would be a backlash. The shock was an enormous one. It affected some countries—Greece, for example—as severely as the Great Depression. If there had not been some kind of reaction, that would have been remarkable. It took the financial crisis to make everybody start talking about inequality, even though if you look at the data on income or wealth inequality, it had been widening since the 1980s in the United States, and indeed in quite a few other countries around the world.

Nineteenth-century parallels

In the 1870s, there was a chap in California named Denis Kearney, whose slogan was “The Chinese must go” and who campaigned to restrict immigration from China into the United States very successfully. In 1882, Congress passed the Exclusion Act, and from that point on, Chinese immigration to the United States was limited to the point of stopping altogether. So we’ve seen a late-19th-century version of this movie before, and there’s nothing about it that’s new.

Don’t be the villain

What tends to happen in the wake of a crisis as the dust settles, once people recover from their financial difficulties and turn to politics, is that they castigate big business. It’s very striking that the big banks were the first targets of public dissatisfaction, but that has spread in recent years to the big technology companies. And I think there’s a good reason for that. Ultimately, what has made our populism distinctive is not so much the content, not the ideas, which are entirely historically familiar; it’s the form, and the form has been determined by the advent of social media, the dominance of our public sphere by network platforms, Google and Facebook in particular, but also Twitter. And it perhaps was predictable that after a certain amount of time, these network platforms would be the targets for attack. We now have a debate, which is one of the few bipartisan debates in the United States, about the power of big technology companies. Antitrust is an issue that you hear debated both on the left amongst Democrats, and on the right amongst Republicans.

From the vantage point of a chief executive, reputation is extraordinarily important. When it comes to the shifting sands of legislation and regulation, unpopular companies are vulnerable in a way that popular companies are not. The obvious lesson from the Gilded Age is don’t be the villain of the piece. John D. Rockefeller became the villain of the original antitrust movement in a way that Andrew Carnegie avoided. Why? I think it’s partly about bad luck, in the sense that Standard Oil was unlucky enough to be the target of some extremely effective muckraking reporting, and that didn’t happen to Carnegie. But it’s also because Carnegie understood the power of philanthropy to offset the unpopularity that you inevitably accumulate as a successful businessman. And Carnegie was extraordinarily revolutionary in his philanthropy. He said that you should give it all away—not half, as in the giving pledge that we have today—all of it. In a wonderful essay on wealth, Carnegie argued that you should spend the first third of your life educating yourself, the second third making money, and the third third giving it all away. So there’s a reason that we remember him fondly. Most of us associate him more with public libraries than with steel. I think there’s a lesson here, and we see some people, such as Bill Gates, learning it well.

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Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of 14 books, the latest of which is The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power (Allen Lane, 2017).