Michael Zakim, "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
08/08/19 • 77 min
The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.
This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”
Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel.
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The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.
This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”
Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
Previous Episode
Sarah L. Quinn, "American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but government credit has been part of American life since the nation’s founding. Sarah L. Quinn’s new book dissects the political and social development of these policies in American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2019). Quinn is associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington.
From the 1780s, when national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, Quinn examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. American Bonds shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America’s complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.
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Next Episode
Philip Grant, "Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped" (Oxford UP, 2017)
The authors of Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped (Oxford University Press, 2017) make points that professionals already know and that end-investors ought to know: that there are a lot of cooks in the investment kitchen, and that the investment process is materially shaped by the chain of individuals and institutions that go into manufacturing investment products. Advisors, consultants, compliance, sales, portfolio managers, analysts, traders, distributors, custodians---these job titles are just part of that machinery. And they all interact with one another in a variety of ways. Most people operating in a complex industry understand that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that affects the ultimate outcome of the manufacturing process or service generation. Investment management is the same. Chains of Finance is part of a growing literature in the social studies of finance that highlights that investment is an interactive social process, not a cut and dried application of some algorithm, even when it is promoted as a computer-driven, machine only exercise. Please listen to my interview with one of the authors, Philip Grant, here....
Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com
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