Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

So often, when we hear about computing or computers, we think about disruption—some technological advancement that signals a radical break with all that came before. But what if that's wrong, or at the very least, incomplete? Today's guest, Devin Kennedy, argues that the twentieth-century history of computing is marked just as much by continuity as change—even between eras, like Fordism and post-Fordism, that we usually separate with a bright line. I promise you: it's the only book you'll read this year that'll take you all the way from Taylorism up to the 2010 Wall Street flash crash. Listen on to learn more.  

The story of neoliberal capitalism's emergence in the United States typically begins with Ronald Reagan. By contrast, recent scholarship has emphasized the bipartisan nature of the rise of free market politics. Revisiting the history of mid-century liberalism, historians have shown how significant aspects of the New Deal relied on private sector actors and facilitated, as opposed to constrained, market activity. Moving forward in time, they have shown how New Democrats like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) further repositioned the party in the late 20th century, moving away from its traditional support for social welfare and labor and towards pro-market solutions in response to economic and political stagnation during the 1970s and 1980s. Black Democrats, when they appear, are frequently portrayed as critics of the party's realignment and neoliberalism more broadly. That is a mistake, according to Danielle Wiggins. In this episode, Wiggins reveals Black liberals as some of the original New Democrats and assesses their role as key architects in constructing neoliberal capitalism at local and national scales.

Rolling Stone: just saying the words conjures a whiff patchouli and pot smoke, flashes of of Jim Morison, Janis Joplin, and Lester Bangs, and strains of the Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone.  But our guest this month argues that the magazine was so much more than that. Rolling Stone was in fact pivotal in the remaking of consumer capitalism since the 1960s. In our conversation, we talk about evolving taste cultures, the co-optation of radical politics, and the past and future of criticism. And don't worry—Lester Bangs is in there too. So fire up your hi-fi, flip on your black light, and listen to today's interview. 

The year was 1984, "The Year of the Yuppie," according to Newsweek magazine. Yuppies may have been a classic 1980s stereotype, but they were also a very real demographic as revealed in this month's episode featuring our very own Dylan Gottlieb. Gottlieb explains how hundreds of thousands of highly-educated, young, urban professionals flocked to New York and other cities during the 1980s, transforming the US economy in the process. Yuppies, Gottlieb argues, were the footsoldiers of late twentieth-century financialization, writing the legal briefs and crunching the numbers for the corporate takeovers that fueled Wall Street's rise and the growing inequality that accompanied it. They were also some of financialization's primary beneficiaries. As other Americans saw their wages stagnate and opportunities dwindle, yuppies—and the high salaries they earned—stood out as a lone bright spot in the broader downward 1980s economy, attracting attention from retailers, developers, city officials, and national politicians. 

The very dregs. Of the very lowest kind. This is how radical abolitionist David Walker described the freedom accorded Black people in the 19th century. In this month's episode, Justin Leroy explores the economic thought of people like Walker, alongside Maria Stewart, William Apess, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, and Ida B. Wells. Despite their prominence in the field of African American history, these figures have rarely been taken up as economic thinkers or theorists of racial capitalism. Treating them as such, as Leroy does, offers an alternative narrative of racial capitalism's evolution outside the slave South, the limits of freedom under capitalism and white supremacy, and a possible path forward through the pursuit of abolition democracy.