In Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink

IN THE FIRST QUARTER of 2011, the average American household carried $115,000 of mortgage, credit-card, and other forms of debt—a huge sum, but less (because of the recession) than the figure for the third quarter of 2008, when the average family owed more than $125,000 to financial institutions and other organizations. This enormous ocean of red ink has become big, big business. In both the go-go years of 2006 and 2007, for example, the nation’s largest credit-card issuers earned more than $18 billion—more than Wal-Mart or Microsoft.

In Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, Louis Hyman, Ph.D. ’07, reconstructs the history of personal debt in modern America. This is a fascinating, important, and at times ominous story. It begins around 1917, when personal indebtedness existed at the fringes of the economy, the province of struggling merchants and loan sharks, and ends in our own time, when personal debt has become a cornerstone of economic and capital-market activity, and the center of the recent financial crisis.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/07/devoted-to-debt

2013 ASET Conference

This year the annual ASET (economics) conference will be held in conjunction with the ACSS conference.

Keynote Address:

Dr. Mark C. Schug, Professor Emeritus University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Common Core in the Social Studies: Who Desegregated Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson or Adam Smith?"

2013 ACSS Fall Conference

Saturday, Nov. 2nd

Grand Canyon University

"Common Core: Staking a Claim in the 21st Century"

A New Addition This Year - Pre-Conference Workshops!

Economics - Common Core - Geography and many more...

Friday, November 1, 2013

The Second Annual ACHE Conference

The Second Annual ACHE Conference will be held on September 7, 2013 at the Mesa Arts Center

"A New Birth of Freedom"

http://www.azhistorycouncil.org/2013_Conference.html

We will never run out of oil . . . .

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/08/technological-change-and-natural-resource-prices-becker.html

Becker makes an important analysis in a clear and accessible manner - too bad this message falls on deaf ears.

The long run picture is very different, for then opportunities to substitute away from the resources rising most in price are much greater because users have more time to adjust. For example, more permanent higher prices of gasoline induce consumers eventually to shift toward smaller more fuel-efficient cars, and drive less with the cars they have. They carpool more, make greater use of public transportation, or even take jobs nearer their homes. Cars are smaller and more efficient in Europe and Japan than in the US in good part because gasoline prices have been much lower in US.

Longer run adjustments on the supply side are also much larger, and some of them are game-changers.

AO Hirschman

I am reading this biography and agree completely with Warsh's assessment - both of the biography and the subject:
Thanks to Adelman’s magnificent biography, there may yet be an Ithaca, after all, for one of the greatest action-intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Certainly it is a gripping story, even if you don’t know anything about the history of development economics in the years after World War II. Hirschman was born in Berlin to a family of thoroughly assimilated Jews, and enjoyed a privileged youth in Weimar Germany. He left Berlin for Paris in April 1933, days after his father’s death, two month after Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship. Already the seventeen-year-old law student’s friends were being arrested. Hirschman spent the next decade fighting the Nazis.

Another review of Freaks of Fortune

http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/the-alchemy-of-finance

But the story of risk, as Jonathan Levy shows us in Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, is anything but new. Levy traces the evolution and popularization of the idea of “risk” from the early nineteenth century, which he sees as the origin point of our contemporary American entanglement with finance.

In contrast to older histories of capitalism that focus on changes in property ownership, the class structure, or the expansion of the market, Levy deals with financial institutions and the rise of a network of financial relationships. His interest in these, though, is not so much their economic function as their cultural and intellectual influence. The question is not how futures contracts changed the economy, but how they both invented and were part of a new way of thinking about time and about material reality. Insurance is interesting to him as a way of understanding how people came to consider their lives and labors as assets—commodities to be insured. The interlocking history of the rise of accounting and the abolitionist movement suggests something important about new ideas of freedom. Levy’s purpose is to think about and take apart the daily reality and underlying assumptions of life and selfhood under capitalism, and to show the history that lies beneath our most mundane conceptions of ourselves. “Analyzing the nitty-gritty details of new financial practices demonstrates how risk burrowed into popular consciousness,” as he puts it.

In this way, Freaks of Fortune is an excellent example of the recent move in American historiography toward writing the “history of capitalism,” which promises to jettison the divisions between labor, economic, and business history, offering instead an expansive vision of how to write about the political, cultural, and intellectual meaning of the economy. These histories seek to undo the economist’s image of the market as a space that transcends history, in which categories such as “risk” are essentially timeless, by showing how much of what we take for granted as natural today is in fact the product of historical change. Freaks of Fortune is not just an important book in its own right, but a model of a new kind of scholarship—and accordingly it offers a chance to think about both the insights afforded and the questions raised by this new approach.

NY Times review Freaks of Fortune

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html

The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”

That doesn’t mean just looking in the executive suite and ledger books, scholars are quick to emphasize. The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.

“I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’ ” said Louis Hyman, an assistant professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell and the author of “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.”

The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.

Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.

“Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”

In 1996, when the Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalism — the first of its kind, he believes — colleagues were skeptical. “They thought no one would be interested,” he said.

But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses, as courses and programs at Princeton, Brown, Georgia, the New School, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowds — sometimes with the help of canny brand management.