''Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink'' is a book written by
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
economic historian Louis Hyman
Louis Roland Hyman (born 1977) is an American writer and economic historian. He is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University's School of Industrial & Labor Relations.
Education
Afte ...
and published by
Princeton University Press in 2011.
Argument
The book argues that in order to understand the rise of our contemporary debt-driven economy, we must look back at the history of American markets and American policy in the 20th century.
The book combines the methods of economic, business, political, and
social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...
.
Chapters
The book is arranged into nine chapters, spanning the twentieth century.
* An Introduction to the History of Debt
Chapter One: Making Credit Modern: The Origins of the Debt Infrastructure in the 1920s* Chapter Two: Debt and Recovery:
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
Housing Policy and the Making of National Mortgage Markets
* Chapter Three: How
Commercial Bankers Discovered Consumer Credit: The
Federal Housing Administration and Personal Loan Departments, 1934–1938
* Chapter Four: War and Credit: Government Regulation and Changing Credit Practices
* Chapter Five: Postwar Consumer Credit: Borrowing for Prosperity
* Chapter Six: Legitimating the Credit Infrastructure: Race, Gender, and Credit Access
* Chapter Seven: Securing Debt in an Insecure World:
Credit Cards
A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...
and
Capital Markets
* Epilogue: Debt as Choice, Debt as Structure
In popular culture
Hyman's arguments in ''Debtor Nation'' inform his explanations of the financial crisis in
David Sington's documentary ''The Flaw'' which
premiere
A première, also spelled premiere, is the debut (first public presentation) of a play, film, dance, or musical composition.
A work will often have many premières: a world première (the first time it is shown anywhere in the world), its first ...
d at the
Sheffield International Documentary Festival in November 2010.
See also
* ''
Debt: The First 5000 Years'' a 2011 book by
David Graeber
David Rolfe Graeber (; February 12, 1961September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books '' Debt: The First 5,000 Years'' (2011) and ''Bullshit Jobs ...
References
External links
''Debtor Nation'' author's site for the book
the publisher's site for the book
"Chapter One: Making Credit Modern: The Origins of the Debt Infrastructure in the 1920s"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Debtor Nation
2011 non-fiction books
History books about the United States
Princeton University Press books