Eli Cook's Critical Reads
Eli Cook is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Haifa. His forthcoming book on the history of American capitalization is The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. Eli Cook will discuss The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life on Friday 10/6, 6:30pm at the Co-op.
Land of Desire, by William Leach - Still perhaps the best historical critique of consumer capitalism.
Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert - A fresh and critical new look at the industrial revolution.
Origins of the Federal Reserve System, by Jim Livingston - A classic text on the link between class power and central banking.
The Incorporation of Modern America, by Alan Trachtanberg - A top cultural history on how corporate capitalism changed our world.
Labor of Love, by Moira Wiegel - A fresh look at the link between dating and capitalism
No Place of Grace, by Jackson Lears - Explores the dark sides of capitalist modernity.
Age of Acquiescence, by Steve Fraser - A poignant critique of our political powers.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey - Still the best introduction into the neoliberal revolution of the last 50 years.
The Culture of the New Capitalism, by Richard Stennet - How has neoliberalism changed the way we see oursevles?
Brahmin Capitalism, by Noam Maggor - A critical look at the first Gilded Age.
Freaks of Fortune, by Jon Levy - A fascinating history of capitalism and risk.
About The Pricing of Progress: How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life.
Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities.
Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals
Related Titles
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE - A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.
"Masterly ... An astonishing achievement." --The New York...
The rise of corporate capitalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries has long been a source of lively debate among historians. In Origins of the Federal Reserve System, James Livingston approaches this controversial topic from a fresh perspective, asking how, during this era, a...
A classic examination of the roots of corporate culture, newly revised and updated for the twenty first century
Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its...
"Does anyone date anymore?" Today, the authorities tell us that courtship is in crisis. But when Moira Weigel dives into the history of sex and romance in modern America, she discovers that authorities have always said this. Ever since young men and women started to go out together, older...
Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became...
Tracking the movement of finance capital toward far-flung investment frontiers, Noam Maggor reconceives the emergence of modern capitalism in the United States. Brahmin Capitalism reveals the decisive role of established wealth in the transformation of the American economy in the decades...
