Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Back in high school, my social studies teacher—who was, of course, also the football coach—told my class that entrepreneurs were the heroes of American history. If we enjoyed a dynamic economy and good jobs, it was all thanks to their genius for innovation and risk-taking. And if we wanted to get ahead, he said, we’d need to foster the same sort of entrepreneurial spirit in ourselves. You are probably rolling your eyes right now. I certainly remember doing the same back in 10th grade. But Erik Baker’s new book, Make Your Own Job How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, revealed that my teacher was far from outlier: he was part of a century-long current of entrepreneurial boosterism. From Henry Ford to Marcus Garvey, Peter Drucker to Sam Walton, the War on Poverty to the shareholder value revolution, Baker shows how the entrepreneurial work ethic captivated thinkers in every corner of American life. And he reveals how for workers, it promised a way to transcend precarity and—just maybe—become the protagonist of one’s own economic life.

Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States’ global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly. But as Mary Bridges argues, America’s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges’ follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization.

A simple leather shoe. A scratchy shirt made of cotton or wool. A roughly-hewn axe. A leather whip, braided in New Jersey. Southern slavery did not just depend on an extractive economic system, or a highly-unequal racial and social order, or a brutal regime of labor exploitation—even though it needed all of those things. It also required a vast array of goods: real, tangible tools and garments that were usually made in the North and used in the South. Seth Rockman’s new book follows those everyday objects: from their production, to their sale, to their distribution and use on plantations. Along the way, he reveals the economic and imaginative ties that linked people living across antebellum America—North and South. And he explains how those plantation goods could become sites of struggle, as slaves used them to contest the terms of their bondage.

Taxes. Is there anything Americans like to complain about more? This episode takes a deep dive into the U.S. tax system, paying particular attention to the property tax. Exploding a popular myth that purports Black Americans pay little to no taxes, historian Andrew Kahrl reveals how Black Americans have long paid more than their fair share of property taxes amid and after the rise of the Jim Crow fiscal order. Along the way, we also discuss the role property taxes play in local government, movements for equitable taxation, and the exploitative tax lien industry and its role in a massive government-sanctioned theft of Black land.

450 million. According to our best estimates, that’s how many guns there are in the United States. To put that in perspective: if you gave a firearm to every single person in the nation—including babies and young children—you’d still have at least 100 million guns left over. Why did we amass such a large stockpile of guns? How did the US become an outlier among nations when it came to civilian gun ownership? On this month’s episode, Andrew McKevitt reveals the history of what he calls “gun capitalism” in the decades after World War II. He helps us see how the exploding firearms market was related to broader currents: from the rise of mass consumerism, to Cold War anti-communism, to grassroots social movements for consumer regulation. Is there any way to stem the seemingly limitless accumulation of guns in the United States? Take a listen and find out.