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Take a moment and think back to the moment in life when you decided on your career path. What is the ?perfect? occupation? Does it use all of a person?s natural abilities or is it a learned trade? Is their room for advancement? Will there still be a job available in this field when you grow old? How many years of schooling are necessary and what level of degree is needed? Most importantly though, how much money can one make? In America, a common goal in the lives of most people is to become happy. A correlation can be drawn in our society between wealth and happiness. The American dream is based, for the most part, on the ability to pursue whatever career one decides on and to have the chance of becoming successful and prosperous. One might ask, how did wealth become so important in our society? Also, where did this wealth come from? For the answers to these questions we must go back into the times of the industrial revolution and the period known as the Gilded Age. To put things simply, during this period America had almost no middle class. There were the very, very affluent people, (known as Robber Barons) and the very, very poor people living in slums. In order to understand why and how this wealth was created one must put t