The book examines the social position and decline of America's leisure class, tracing how rapid industrial and financial developments, consolidation of industry into trusts, and departures from older European traditions produced wasteful extravagance and social imbalance. Drawing on observations of banking, manufacturing, and the absorption of individual enterprises into large combinations, the author critiques inherited privilege, idle consumption, and the parasitic dependence of useless labor on productive work, and argues that rising public discontent and reform movements point toward a transformation that will curtail or assimilate the habits of the idle wealthy into a more democratic society.