>The experiment wasn't even necessary - the Gilded Age was a libertarian'paradise with the gold standard and very little government regulation. What do we most associate with this era? Robber barons, utility monopolies screwing people over with ruthless business practices, confidence men and literal snake oil quack medicine.
The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.
Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness. In spite of the vast amount of pills modern people take. So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.
So we can ignore that cancer used to be a guaranteed death sentence, polio was a thing, children got rickets, a septic wound could kill you, an ulcer wasn't a course of pills to get rid of, tuberculosis was rife.
The gilded age was no paradise and rose tinted views of the era just don't hold up to scrutiny.
I don't know what the Gilded Age was (and too lazy to search) but, I quote "Over the past 160 years, life expectancy (from birth) in the United States has risen from 39.4 years in 1860, to 78.9 years in 2020"[1] so please do show some support for the affirmation "the average adult back then was much healthier". Unless you mean they all died healthy around 40 years of age - as in, they were totally healthy until 40 then the first illness killed them clean.
While your point is absolutely true, note that life expectancy shouldn't be taken as the literal age most people die. It is the expected value of your age at death. Just like the expected value of a coin flip being heads is 0.5, but no coin is ever 0.5 heads.
Life expectancy at birth in the times before modern medicine has always been dragged down significantly by the huge rate of infant mortality. It was more common for a family to have 1-2 dead small children in their past than not. People who lived past 5 or 10 or so would often live to see 70 or so, and 80 or 90 year olds were not unheard of.
That's the nice thing about statistics, we will always have outliers to cherry pick. One can play with the graph at will, but also US men life expectancy at 5yo increased from 55 to 80 in the last 150 years: https://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html. That's without infant mortality.
> The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.
During the industrial revolution? I would expect so. At this point we're on the tail end of those improvements.
> Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness.
Life expectancy has been going up for a long time, but on the obesity front the advent of highly sugary foods thanks to food giants is a result of profiteering, not regulation, and people driving everywhere instead of getting exercise is not because of regulation (though it is due to city planning).
> So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.
Are you sincerely arguing that modern medicine isn't much of an improvement over snake oil medicine? The discovery of penicillin alone has saved literally billions* of lives, to say nothing of painkillers, modern surgical hygiene, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, just so so many improvements in healthcare. I can't take this argument seriously I'm afraid, I can only assume it's a post hoc rationalisation.
* hundreds of millions, I misremembered the number.
The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.
Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness. In spite of the vast amount of pills modern people take. So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.