Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

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Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century Feb 03, 2025

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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.

Mary Bridges on Bankers and the Dawn of American Empire Jan 02, 2025

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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.

Seth Rockman on Slavery's Material History Dec 02, 2024

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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.

Andrew Kahrl on Inequality, Theft, and Taxation in Modern America Nov 05, 2024

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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.

Andrew McKevitt on Gun Capitalism Oct 01, 2024

Show notes

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.

Rachel Gross on How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America Sep 02, 2024

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In 2022 and 2023, an estimated 50 million Americans went camping. Many others participated in outdoor recreation activities ranging from mountain-climbing to sailing. According to the U.S. Department of Congress, in 2022, the outdoor recreation economy was worth $563.7 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP.

In this episode, historian Rachel Gross takes us on an adventure through the outdoor industry's rise, from Teddy Roosevelt's famous buckskin jacket to the ascendance of companies like Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean, to the use of synthetic materials like GoreTex, and much much more. Along the way, we discuss an important question: Why is it that so many people's first stop on the way to the woods is an outdoor store?

Margot Canaday on Queer Workers in Modern America Aug 01, 2024

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In today's episode, Margot Canaday reveals the not-so-hidden history of LGBT workers in modern America. In the absence of state protections, she finds, some employers actually appreciated queer workers precisely because they were contingent, unattached, and exploitable. In many ways, that employment relationship augured the way all workers would come to be treated in the era of post-Fordism. And it would set the terms for queer peoples' struggles for recognition and protections on the job in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Ingleson on the Past and Present of Made in China Jul 01, 2024

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Today, China is the U.S. third largest trading partner and second-largest source of imports. This wasn't always the case. Indeed, in the 1970s, when the United States first began trading with communist China after several decades, few could have foreseen such a scenario. In this episode, guest Elizbeth Ingleson reveals the surprising story of how two Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China's economy into a source of cheap labor. Along the way, we discuss some of the key policy decisions and Chinese and American actors, including U.S. business, that facilitated China's convergence with the capitalist world.

Teresa Ghilarducci on the Past and Future of Retirement Jun 03, 2024

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When we study capitalism, we usually focus on the active time in people's lives: the moments where things like work, consumption, production, trade, accumulation, and exchange all happen. But Teresa Ghilarducci, the guest on this week's episode, argues that capitalism also shapes what happens next, in that period after people's working lives have come to an end.

Teresa's new book, Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy tells the story of how retirement—just like work—has become much more precarious over the past several decades. It's a story about politics, about demographics, about economics. How we pay for retirement, she reveals, tells us a lot about what we value in our society, and how that's changed over time. And along the way, she offers us a few policy proposals that just might remedy the way we handle retirement today.

Cheryl Narumi Naruse on Singapore, Postcolonial Capitalism, and Becoming Global Asia May 05, 2024

Show notes

In this month's episode, co-host Jessica Levy and guest Cheryl Narumi Naruse examine popular narratives surrounding Singapore's "miraculous" journey from Third to First world nation, currently ranked third in the world in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita. The episode takes a particular look at the period leading up to and following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, during which this tiny island city-state underwent a massive rebranding campaign to transform its reputation from a culturally sterile and punitive nation to an alluring location for economic flourishing. Topics discussed include Singapore's relationship with a core constituency of Global Asia, namely Overseas Singaporeans, genres of postcolonial capitalism, and much, much more.

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