“Mother forgive me. God forgive me.” In one of the final scenes of Orson Welles’s brilliant (though tragically mutilated) 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons, the fallen aristocratic scion George Amberson Minafer sits alone in despairing repose the day before leaving his family estate for the last time. “Tomorrow,” says the director in his voice-over narration, “they were to move out. Tomorrow everything would be gone.” Welles’s powerful tale of dynastic decline is also a story about industrial capitalism eating its own, the Amberson fortune and the quintessentially nineteenth-century version of Midwestern wealth that it represents being supplanted by that of the rival Morgan family, whose enterprise is the automobile.

The narrative is a potent one, not least because the relentlessly spoiled George ultimately gets his comeuppance, and the Amberson empire crumbles (though Welles’s original cut was fatally compromised by the bigwigs at RKO Pictures, who tacked on an unforgivably contrived happy ending). It’s also not without precedent in the famous fortunes of the first Gilded Age, a few of which, albeit less dramatically, really did dissipate into historical footnotes.

For that reason, there’s a compelling argument to be made that America’s new Gilded Age is even less meritocratic than its first — as newly published research from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) strongly suggests. “Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality” details the astonishingly dangerous scale of dynastic wealth in the twenty-first century. But it also makes clear how a combination of skewed tax policies, accrued political power and social influence, and raw, unrestrained greed have enabled such fortunes to grow exponentially since the 1980s — enshrining an economic caste system essentially impervious to the kinds of forces that claimed the fictional Ambersons and a few of their real-world equivalents.