Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

For many Americans, the question--What is a dollar worth?--may sound bizarre, if not redundant. Fluctuating international exchange rates, highly volatile crypto-currencies, counterfeit money, these are all things the average American hears about on the news, but rarely thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Even the most enthusiastic Bitcoin supporters will likely readily admit they prefer to conduct...

Today, healthcare workers account for the largest percentage of U.S. workers. Yet, their power pales in comparison to the unionized industrial workforce that preceded them, and whom it is their job now to care for. In this episode, Gabriel Winant explains how these two worlds--the post-war industrial economy and the post-industrial service economy--came together in 'Steel City, USA,' where during...

Despite the rising cost of tuition and a recent slump in college enrollment, many Americans continue to look to education to improve their social and economic status. Yet, more and more degrees have not led to reduced levels of inequality. Rather, quite the opposite. Inequality remains the highest its been in decades. In this episode, Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contra...

In this episode, labor historian Ronald Schatz speaks about the National War Labor Board. Recruited by the government to help resolve union-management conflicts during World War II, many of the labor board vets went on to have long and illustrious careers negotiating conflicts in a wide-range of sectors from the steel industry to public sector unionism. Some were recruited to mitigate unrest on co...

The history of red-lining is one increasingly well-known within and beyond the academy. In the 1930s, as part of an attempt to shore up the struggling economy by underwriting home mortgages, the government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), developed a series of guidelines and criteria for assessing the risk of lending in urban areas. HOLC criteria drew heavily on the racial logics employed b...

It is common these days to bemoan the amount of personal information companies like Amazon, Facebook, and other modern telecommunications goliaths collect about us. For many, this invasion of privacy exists as a necessary consequence of our growing dependence on the internet. With every click of the mouse—making it possible to have products manufactured half-way around the world delivered to our d...

In this episode, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank's success and the challenges this success wrought, including shedding light on the bureaucratic violence that targeted St. Luke's...

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. In Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crisis of Capitalism, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism through revealing the country's role as a laboratory for colonial economism and financial innovation amid the turn of the twe...

The history of globalization is one that has often been told as a story of elites. There are a number of truths to this narrative. Yet, as Casey Lurtz shows, it also ignores some things. In  From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became  Mexico's leading coffee exporter. She does so not by focusing on the M...

Thanks to the work of activists and intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie, Black peoples' demand for reparations have garnered growing attention among politicians, business leaders, university officials, and journalists. For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, today's guest has an important story to tell about a formerly enslaved wom...

Many of us are familiar with the negative health effects of coffee, which include insomnia, nervousness, upset stomach, and increased heart rate. Yet, this hasn't seemed to stop many Americans from reaching for a cup, or two or three, of coffee to help them make it through the day. One estimate puts coffee consumption in the United States at 400 million cups of coffee a day, or more than 140 billi...

It will come as little surprise to most listeners that America's metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. While the suburbs surrounding American cities tend to be relatively affluent and white, many urban areas, especially those with large non-white populations, remain under-resourced and under-served in comparison to their white suburban counterparts. Even as gentrification and oth...

We've all heard the statistics regarding Americans and fast food. According to the National Health and Nutrition Survey, one third of Americans consumed fast food on any given day. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the fast food industry employed nearly 3.8 million Americans, many in minimum wage jobs. Not everyone has the same relationship with fast food. In this episode, we speak with Marcia Ch...

David and Alex are retiring from the show! But a new host is joining to take the reins. Listen to hear the founding co-hosts reflect on the past six years of the show and to meet our new host, Jessica Levy.

Today, we have a special episode. We speak to Zach Carter about COVID-19 and Keyesnianism. Zach is the author of the upcoming book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.   On Wednesday March 18th, he published an op-ed on Keynes's ideas for today. If you like this episode, please donate to Mariame Kaba's redistribution, mutual aid fund : https://www.paypal.com/p...

Dara Orenstein on the Economic Geography of Warehouses If you're like many people throughout the country and world, you've purchased something on Amazon. As a result, you've been incorporated into a set of supply chain relationships that inevitably pass through warehouses. On this episode, we return to topic we've discussed in past episodes—how logistics shapes capitalism. We speak to Dara Orenste...

Often, analyses of the intersections between race and capitalism consider how capitalism harms dispossessed communities of color because excluding or neglecting them is profitable. But what if serving those communities could be both very profitable and very damaging to the people in them? We speak with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about what she calls "predatory inclusion," in which financial instituti...

Eileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker What is work? Who are workers? Which activities are considered work, and which ones are excluded? These questions are some of the most critical questions in political and economic analysis. And how they are answered—both personally and by political institutions—is vital to how people spend their time and thus their lives. On this episode, we invest...

Students in U.S. history surveys come away from their lessons on World War I with one conflict fresh in their minds: How could Woodrow Wilson, a president who advocated segregation and famously screened the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, also have been an architect of the League of Nations and a champion of the self-determination of colonized people in Africa and Asia? In this e...

Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism   The multinational corporation is a pervasive institution. For example, it's nearly impossible to listen to this show without interacting with one. But what is the history of this thing we call the multinational corporation? And who gets to count as its constituents?   Today, we investigate this topic and how it has been s...

When we talk about the 1973 energy crisis, we tend to cast it as a moment when Americans questioned assumptions about how the domestic economy worked and the U.S. role in the global economy. We don't always spend as much time thinking about why the crisis happened, or what it represented in the Global South. OPEC's decision to cut production and raise prices stemmed from a longer history of anti-c...

We've just ended pride month and both the victories and limits of GLBT politics were on view. In San Francisco, protesters engaged in civil disobedience action against the growing corporatization of pride. Activists in San Francisco and elsewhere questioned the role of police in pride, emphasizing that "Stonewall was a riot."   Our guest today traverses these debates by emphasizing the politics of...

We talk a lot about logistics on this show – the industries, like Amazon or FedEx, that have made fortunes managing the movement of goods from one place to another. Logistics companies undergird the globalized economy, making it possible for companies to benefit from low wages and labor abuses in the global South by moving finished products quickly and cheaply to markets all over the world. Our gu...

The Me Too movement has brought much needed attention to sexual violence and harassment both in and outside the workplace. It has challenged patriarchal norms and practices and illuminated entrenched power hierarchies. It also drew strength from longer struggles against the many manifestations of patriarchal power.   On this month's show, we speak to Bernice Yeung about how some of the U.S.'s most...

Amazon's withdrawal from New York City has sparked big conversations about companies' impact on urban space, but less attention has been paid to the fact that, as logistics companies, corporations like Amazon have a particular spatial impact. Juan De Lara discusses how the logistics economy has remade urban regions and racial politics since the 1980s.