Author: Wilbur Clayton PlummerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Installment plan
Languages : en
Pages : 68
Book Description
Social and Economic Consequences of Buying on the Instalment Plan
Author: Wilbur Clayton PlummerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Installment plan
Languages : en
Pages : 68
Book Description
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Author: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Author: Financing the American Dream
Author: Lendol CalderPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400822831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt. The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end--undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth. Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of disciplined rationality and hard work. Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.
The Economics of Instalment Buying
Author: Reavis CoxPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Installment plan
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Book Description
"A selected bibliography on instalment buying": pages 511-518.
Economics of Consumption
Author: Warren Cleland WaitePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Public Affairs Information Service Bulletin
Author: Industrial and Labor Problems ...
Author: Russell Sage Foundation. LibraryPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Industrial relations
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
The Economics of Instalment Selling
Author: Edwin Robert Anderson SeligmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Automobile industry and trade
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Bulletin of the Public Affairs Information Service
Author: Public Affairs Information ServicePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 550
Book Description