John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas is the least affordable city in the US for the middle class, a recent Brookings Institution analysis found

Nestled between two mountain ranges at the crook of central California’s coastline sits a valley known as the “salad bowl of the world”.

Farm workers stoop over neatly lined rows of crops off Highway 101 to harvest more than half of the nation’s supply of lettuce and nearly a third of its strawberries. The soil here is so rich that author John Steinbeck made the Salinas valley the promised land in his literary depictions of people chasing the American dream: immigrants, farm workers, westward-moving hopefuls, hungering for a better life.

Today’s wealth gap is much bigger, and the country’s richest have much more power than they once did. It’s an Age of Oligarchy

For many, the era of US history that most resembles contemporary America is easy to identify: the Gilded Age.

It is, in certain ways, an apt comparison. Like modern America, the Gilded Age saw a small number of men tower over US politics and industry alike. Rising atop a swell of wealth inequality, figures like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller mixed private interests with public policy, opening doors in Washington and beyond with ease. Their model is a clear precedent for figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and more.