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"Households Economic aspects United States History 20th century."
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A century of wealth in America
Edward Wolff, one of the country's leading experts on household wealth, here provides a comprehensive study of wealth in America since 1910. The century brought shifting patterns in the ownership of wealth; Wolff explains the changes, offers ideas about how to reduce inequality, and explores issues in how to measure wealth in the first place. A Century of Wealth in America is not designed to advance one overarching argument; rather, its aim is to provide in one place the accurate information needed to consider many arguments. Still, Wolff presents no fewer than ten major findings in its pages. One of these is that median household wealth has recently returned to the levels of 1969. Another is that the average wealth of black families relative to white families has slipped significantly in recent years, after thirty years of stability. A third finding: the US has changed since 1950 from being one of the most equal countries in the developed world to being one of the most class-ridden. For many readers the book will serve as a complement to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. But while it reinforces Piketty's argument in many ways, it concentrates on wealth (as opposed to income), for example, and says much more about the poor. Wolff's ideas are also different than Piketty's on issues of inheritance (he's less worried about it) and the relationship between r (the rate of return to capital) and g (the overall rate of economic growth). He argues that inequality rises if r for the top one percent is greater than r for the middle class. Finally, thanks to its focus on America, the book provides much more fine-grained detail about the country, not least about the demographics of wealth and poverty.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Household Accounts
With unprecedented subtlety, compassion and richness of detail, Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars. Focusing on families from regions across America and of differing races and ethnicities, she argues that working-class families of the time were not on the verge of entering the middle class and embracing mass culture. Rather, she contends that during the interwar period such families lived in a context of scarcity and limited resources, not plenty. Their consumption, Benson argues, revolved around hard choices about basic needs and provided therapeutic satisfactions only secondarily, if at all.
Household Accountsis rich with details Benson gathered from previously untapped sources, particularly interviews with women wage earners conducted by field agents of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. She provides a vivid picture of a working-class culture of family consumption: how working-class families negotiated funds; how they made qualitative decisions about what they wanted; how they determined financial strategies and individual goals; and how, in short, families made ends meet during this period. Topics usually central to the histories of consumption-he development of mass consumer culture, the hegemony of middle-class versions of consumption, and the expanded offerings of the marketplace-contributed to but did not control the lives of working-class people. Ultimately,Household Accountsseriously calls into question the usual narrative of a rising and inclusive tide of twentieth-century consumption.
eBook
Household accounts : working-class family economies in the interwar United States
With unprecedented subtlety, compassion and richness of detail, Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars.
eBook
Debtor nation
Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America,Debtor Nationtraces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition.
How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production.
From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending,Debtor Nationpresents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.
eBook
Household Accounts
Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars.
Publication
Feeding the World
In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished.
Feeding the Worldsynthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.
eBook
The Spatial Pattern of Suicide in the US in Relation to Deprivation, Fragmentation and Rurality
Analysis of geographical patterns of suicide and psychiatric morbidity has demonstrated the impact of latent ecological variables (such as deprivation, rurality). Such latent variables may be derived by conventional multivariate techniques from sets of observed indices (for example, by principal components), by composite variable methods or by methods which explicitly consider the spatial framework of areas and, in particular, the spatial clustering of latent risks and outcomes. This article considers a latent random variable approach to explaining geographical contrasts in suicide in the US; and it develops a spatial structural equation model incorporating deprivation, social fragmentation and rurality. The approach allows for such latent spatial constructs to be correlated both within and between areas. Potential effects of area ethnic mix are also included. The model is applied to male and female suicide deaths over 2002-06 in 3142 US counties.
Journal Article
American Marriage in the Early Twenty-First Century
During the past century the U.S. family system has seen vast changes-in marriage and divorce rates, cohabitation, childbearing, sexual behavior, and women's work outside the home. Andrew Cherlin reviews these historic changes, noting that marriage remains the most common living arrangement for raising children, but that children, especially poor and minority children, are increasingly likely to grow up in single-parent families and to experience family instability. Cherlin describes the economic and cultural forces that have transformed family life. Job market changes have drawn married women into the work force and deprived less-educated men of the blue-collar jobs by which they traditionally supported their families. And effective contraception and legalized abortion have eroded the norm of marriage before childbearing. Cherlin notes that sentiment in favor of marriage appears to be stronger in the United States than in other developed countries. The share of U.S. adults who are likely to marry is higher, but so is the share likely to divorce. U.S. children are also more likely to live in single-parent families at some time in their childhood. Although nearly all Americans, whether poor or well-to-do, hold to marriage as an ideal, today marriage is increasingly optional. To a greater extent than ever before, individuals can choose whether to form a family on their own, in a cohabiting relationship, or in a marriage. Given U.S. patterns of swift transitions into and out of marriage and high rates of single parenthood, American policymakers eager to promote marriage are unlikely to be able to raise U.S. family stability to levels typical of other developed countries. Consequently, a family policy that relies too heavily on marriage will not help the many children destined to live in single-parent and cohabiting families-many of them poor-during their formative years. Assistance must be directed to needy families, regardless of their household structure. Policymakers must craft a careful balance of marriage-based and marriage-neutral programs to provide adequate support to American children.
Journal Article
Making It in America: Social Mobility in the Immigrant Population
In his survey of research on social mobility and U.S. immigration, George Borjas underscores two insights. First, most immigrants are at a sizable earnings disadvantage, relative to nativeborn workers. Second, the earnings of different groups of immigrants vary widely. The children of immigrants \"catch up\" to native-born workers slowly. The jump in relative wages between the first and second generations is somewhere between 5 and 10 percentage points. Of particular concern is that the age-adjusted relative wage of both immigrants and second-generation workers has been falling-a trend with bleak implications for the children of immigrants. The wide ethnic variation in the earnings of immigrants has equally important implications. National origin groups from advanced economies, such as Canada, do much better in the U.S. labor market than those from poorer countries, such as Mexico. And the initial ethnic differences tend to persist. In rough terms, about half of the difference in relative economic status persists from one generation to the next. Thus a 20 percentage point wage gap among ethnic groups in the immigrant generation implies a 10 point gap among second-generation groups and a 5 point gap among third-generation groups. Again in rough terms, Borjas attributes about half of that persistence to the ethnic environment in which children are raised. Borjas cautions that the rate of social mobility that immigrants enjoyed over much of the twentieth century may not continue in the future. The employment sectors seeking immigrants today are unlikely to provide the same growth opportunities as did the rapidly expanding manufacturing sector a century ago. And in contrast to the many and diverse ethnic groups that made up early twentieth-century immigrants, the large ethnic groups of immigrants today may develop separate economies and social structures, in effect hindering their social mobility.
Journal Article
The Big House after Slavery
The Big House after Slaveryexamines the economic, social, and political challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat and emancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded to postwar problems and how their adaptations to life without slavery altered their marital relationships and their conceptions of gender roles.
Unable to afford many servants in the new free labor economy, many of Virginia's former masters put themselves to work on their plantations, and their wives had to expand their responsibilities as well, taking on the tasks of cooking and cleaning in addition to working in the garden, the henhouse, and the dairy. Laboring in these ways and struggling to maintain their standing as elites contributed to an identity crisis among Virginia planters. It also led them to practice mutuality within their own marriages and to reconsider what proper Southern womanhood and manhood meant in the new postwar order.
Using newspapers, periodicals, organization records, and numerous letters from Virginia plantation families, Morsman captures how these frustrated elites made sense of embarrassing postwar changes, in the private but also in the public spheres they inhabited. Morsman suggests that the planters' adaptations may have been carried forward by their adult children away from the crumbling plantations and into the urban households of the New South.
eBook