OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi chapter 18 sav i ng a n d spen di ng l endol c alder ‘Before long the question of money came up again.’ Madame Bovary Money matters. It always has. Of Jesus’ thirty-three parables, iteen are stories about coins, debts, or investments. he Buddha, not normally given to aphorisms about money, nevertheless is represented in the Pali canon as saying the wise and moral man ‘should divide his money in four parts; on one part he should live, with two expand his trade, and the fourth he should save against a rainy day.’ In feudal China, the merchant-statesman Fan Li amassed an enormous fortune following the advice of his teacher, Ji Ran, who said, ‘One must not allow money to be idle.’ Fan Li’s maxims, still in print 2,500 years later, counsel those who handle money to ‘Be vigilant in credit control’, ‘Don’t be pennypinching’, and ‘Don’t undersave—keep reserve funds strong’. Clearly, money has always mattered, even when there was not a lot of it. he conclusion is seconded by economic anthropologists.1 But surely in modern consumer societies money matters more. How it came to matter more, in what ways, and to what efect, historians have only begun to study. Monetization describes the process whereby money became the dominant means of exchange in developing commercial societies. It is an economic development whose profound social, political, and cultural consequences are not yet well understood. he monetization of household economic life elevated practices that once afected only 1 J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds.), Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). he quotation attributed to the Buddha appears in ‘he Admonition to Singāla’, in R. K. Pruthi (ed.), Buddhism and Indian Civilization (New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 2004), 132. Ji Ran’s maxim appears in HuanZhang Chen, he Economic Principles of Confucius and His School, Vol. 2 (PhD. diss., Columbia University, 1911), 457. Fan Li’s formula for success was written under the name he later adopted, Tao Zhugong, Golden Rules for Business Success (Singapore: AsiaPac Books, 2006). 0001333355.INDD 348 8/8/2011 12:47:00 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  the wealthy—Fan Li’s ‘golden rules for business success’—to core competencies of living mandatory for everyone. For this reason, concerns about money—how to get it, how to save it, how to invest, multiply, and spend it—have likely sold more books in the last two hundred years than any other subject ater religion. he print culture that helped people make sense of money—through inancial advice ofered in books, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements—awaits its historian. We do not know whether inancial advice over the years has followed a prevailing script or if vernacular economic theory is divided into schools and periods in the manner of its highbrow cousin, the ield of macroeconomics. It is not an exaggeration to say that we know more about how the Ford Motor Company inanced its business empire than we know about how car buyers scraped up the money to buy Fords. But we do know a few things. We know that handling money is part of the work of modern consumption, a point that gets lost when consumer societies are regarded merely as pleasure grounds for fun and relaxation. he second thing we know is that no one inherits prudence. Every generation has to learn to handle money for itself. In a 2007 hit song titled ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’, hip-hop artist Kanye West sampled a sentiment held by moralists from the beginning of monetization: ‘I had a dream I can buy my way to heaven / When I awoke, I spent that on a necklace / I told God I’d be back in a second / Man it’s so hard not to act reckless.’ Recklessness is a real problem for people living in highly monetized societies, as the global economic crisis of 2008–9 reminds us. To say no to marketeers, to stretch an income, to make money multiply, to use it on one’s own terms—such acts call for skills, dispositions, and intelligences that are for the most part not inborn but require education and cultural support. How has money—so necessary, so potent, so hard to get in every sense of the word—been lived by people in consumer societies? How have they managed it? Responses to monetization have varied, of course—from society to society; by class, gender, race, and religion; and over time as well. But the general response to monetization has been to look for money management techniques to help one, in the words of a 1980s credit card slogan, ‘master the possibilities’. horstein Veblen referred to such techniques as “the intellectual discipline of pecuniary management.”2 Preferring a more limber term, I call them the inancial arts. Like the liberal arts, the martial arts, the culinary arts, and so forth, the inancial arts are a disciplinary realm ofering freedom and well-being through the mastery of form. hus, the inancial arts operate as a counterweight to consumer societies’ libertine tendencies (which is not to say that the inancial arts, like the other arts, are not implicated in acts of hedonic consumerism). his chapter reviews what historians know about the inancial arts—that is, the beliefs, skills, dispositions, and practices undergirding how people make sense of money and what they do with it once it comes into their possession. Some might wonder whether money management really has a history. Is not prudence eternally necessary in human society, recommended in every tradition, if disregarded by 2 horstein Veblen, he Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), 321. 0001333355.INDD 349 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder nearly all? It is an objection I imagine Mr Micawber making: ‘ “My other piece of advice, Copperield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” ’ If the law of prudence is this unrelenting, the practice of money management can hardly be expected to change over time. Savers prosper; spenders go to their doom. What more is there to say on the subject? Much more, as it turns out. he Micawber Principle has value as inancial advice, but as a historical argument it is deeply mistaken. Contra Micawber, income has not always placed an absolute, binding limit on consumption. In various times and places, consumers have violated conventional understandings of prudence and prospered to tell about it. Some have crashed and burned too, which is an important part of the story. But the point is that the history of money management is not a book with one chapter. If it looks banal, look again. he search for a proper balance between saving and spending, between permissions that unleash creativity and restraints that limit a myopic preference for the present over the future, remains an important project of self-formation for modern people. Relecting on the scholarship that has examined saving and spending, I ofer the following points as an assessment of where things stand and as a call for more research. First is the rather obvious conclusion that money has always mattered to people. But now, a surprising second point: the signiicance of money, the fact that people worry about it, that spouses quarrel over it, that consumers scheme day and night to multiply it until money becomes the equal of their desires, all of this might be missed if the only thing one had to read were histories of consumption. For reasons that will need to be considered, historians of consumer culture have not given the inancial afairs of consumers the attention the subject deserves. Finally, the historical work that has been done, though sparse, amply demonstrates the rich potential of the inancial arts for generating signiicant problem areas for research. Few other subjects in the glittering universe of consumption lead more directly to the largest questions we can ask about desire, virtue, and the construction of the modern self. The Known World of Money In the early 1990s, Jean Christophe-Agnew characterized scholarship on the history of consumption as an ‘embarrassment of riches’.3 here has been no let-up in production since. But if we have learned a great deal about the things money can buy—goods, services, leisure, and entertainments—we are still mostly in the dark about how people 3 Jean-Christophe Agnew, ‘Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 20. 0001333355.INDD 350 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  paid for them. Money, the one indispensable thing in a consumer society, has been hard to see for historians. his is not to say that nothing is known about the history of money itself. Dozens of serious, big-picture histories of money have been written, building on without surpassing John Kenneth Galbraith’s Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went.4 Galbraith and his successors answer basic questions about the development of coinage and currency, the ebbs and lows of commodity prices, the speciics of recurring inancial crises, the rise of inancial institutions such as banking and the agencies that regulate them, and other matters of business and public inance relevant to the study of consumers and their money. But the histories of money written thus far shine little light on the circuitries of money within society’s smaller commonwealths, its families, and households. What this means is that the history of the inancial arts and how they have been practised is the most under-studied, under-theorized, and under-narrated problem area in the history of modern consumption. Historians have focused so intently on the relations between consumers and goods that they have walked right past the antecedent problem of how consumers managed to aford to buy goods. In a bibliography of the history of money, history has nothing to put up against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Simmel’s he Philosophy of Money, or Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance. Unlike with advertising, department stores, and signature consumer goods such as the automobile, the study of saving and spending has yet to generate even a single comprehensive monograph advancing our understanding of how money has been lived.5 Leaders Without Followers A Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1985 and awoke to read this chapter would probably be confused at this point. He would object, correctly, that early, trailblazing work on the history of modern consumption took household inance very seriously. What happened? It is true that the irst historical studies positing a consumer revolution drew attention to money matters. For example, Daniel Boorstin’s he Americans: he Democratic Experience sketched the broad outlines of a history of credit inancing, which Boorstin considered to be a crucial element for the development of American consumerism. ‘It was hardly an exaggeration to say,’ observed Boorstin, ‘that the American standard of 4 John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (Boston: Houghton Milin, 1975); Niall Ferguson, he Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 5 Examples of what history is lacking that can be found in other disciplines include Viviana Zelizer, he Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Andrew Leyshon and Nigel hrit, Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (London: Routledge, 1997). 0001333355.INDD 351 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder living was bought on the installment plan.’6 Likewise, in one of the most inluential works of British history ever published, he Birth of a Consumer Society: he Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, John Brewer discovered while researching his contribution to the volume that he could not get very far exploring the origins of a consumer society in England without looking into inancial conduct, the question of how money was managed to facilitate trade and consumption. In his contribution to the volume, John Brewer noted, ‘Private indebtedness . . . has received much less attention from historians [than public credit] despite the fact that it was a persistent and indeed ubiquitous source of anxiety in Hanoverian England.’7 Generalized beyond England, Brewer’s observation remains true today and could serve as an epigraph to everything said thus far. Money and inance matters to people a great deal, and always has, though how it has mattered since the inancial arts became a necessary set of disciplines under conditions of complete monetization is not something historians have looked into thoroughly. Boorstin and Brewer drew attention to important subjects, but few followed up.8 Why so Few Histories of Money Matters? Before examining some important exceptions to the overall neglect, it may be instructive for the development of future work to pause and consider why historians have been squeamish about examining money. he power of money has been a popular theme in art, literature, and popular music. Why have historians slighted it? An explanation worth considering comes from Viviana Zelizer, author of he Social Meaning of Money, who has observed that in her ield of sociology, money has taken a backseat to other inquiries ‘as if it were not sociological enough.’9 Zelizer’s eye-opening discoveries of how money worked in people’s lives in the United States between 1870 and 1930 led her to believe that almost everything social scientists have assumed about money is wrong. According to Zelizer, the irst generation of sociologists sufered from an ‘intellectual color blindness’ about money. Early theorists viewed monetary transactions as corrosive of personal bonds and culture, rendering social life cold, distant, and 6 Daniel Boorstin, he Americans: he Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 426. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, he Birth of a Consumer Society: he Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 203. 8 Interestingly, early attempts to present overviews of consumer culture oten mention the importance of money management, only to drop the subject ater the irst paragraph. For examples, see Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), he Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Christopher Lasch, ‘he Culture of Consumption’, in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Social History, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), Volume II: 1381–1390; and Susan Strasser, ‘Consumption’ in Stanley I. Kutler (ed.), Encyclopedia of the United States in the 20th Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1995). Strasser went the furthest, beginning with her perceptive claim that credit management and bargaining with cash must be considered part of the ‘work’ of modern consumption. 9 Zelizer, he Social Meaning of Money, 4. 7 0001333355.INDD 352 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  calculating. Money was said to be ‘abstract and impersonal’ (Weber), reducing social relations between people to an ‘unmeaning,’ purely quantitative ‘cash nexus’ (Marx) in which the ‘colorlessness and indiference’ of money ‘hollows out the core of things’ (Simmel). According to Simmel, money’s most inluential academic interpreter, money possesses a rationalizing logic asking only ‘how much’, not ‘what and how’. Money, Simmel believed, turned the world into ‘an arithmetic problem’.10 Zelizer’s conclusion is that these early ideas about money became powerfully inluential but made a poor foundation for further analysis. Money was assumed to be a colourless, uninteresting force on a par with gravity and other constants lacking interesting trajectories of historical development. Zelizer summarizes the thinking of twentieth-century social scientists with words from Gertrude Stein: ‘Whether you like it or whether you do not money is money and that is all there is about it.’11 Who would want to study something like that? Zelizer’s explanation for why sociologists disregarded money can account for the similar lacuna found in histories of consumer culture. As a test case, consider William Leach’s Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. In this magisterial work, Leach brilliantly describes how Americans’ longing for goods was stoked by a new commercial aesthetic that sought to show of goods day and night through astonishing manipulations of colour, light, and glass. In the new cultural order symbolized by department store show windows, ‘money was at the heart of it all’, maintains Leach. So much so that he lists ‘the inluence of money’ as one of four cardinal features of the emergent culture of consumer capitalism. But whereas the other three cardinal elements are given densely argued narratives to explain their meaning and signiicance, Leach’s sweeping claims about money are largely undeveloped. hus, when Leach maintains that ‘pecuniary values would constitute the base measure for all other values’, he assumes that readers will ind the claim self-evident. he footnotes show that Leach knows what he knows about money not on the basis of historical analysis but from economists and sociologists, the very people Zelizer identiies as formative for how social science came to understand—or rather, misunderstand—money.12 he lesson for those who would pick up where Land of Desire leaves of is clear: common assumptions about money thought to end in full points may deserve question marks instead. Do markets really empty human life of moral signiicance? Has money worked historically to homogenize and latten social relations? Have the inancial arts razed authentic values with a wrecking ball of numerical logic? Future work touching these questions will build on Zelizer’s discovery that money is not sterile, but deeply meaningful in people’s lives. 10 Ibid., 6–9. Ibid., 1–2. 12 For his ideas on money, Leach leans heavily on Charles Horton Cooley, an early president of the American Sociological Association. Glossing Cooley’s scorn for pecuniary values, Leach concludes his thoughts on money with a peroration reminiscent of Marx, Weber, and Simmel: ‘Increasingly, the worth of everything—even beauty, friendship, religion, the moral life—was being determined by what it could bring in the market.’ See William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3–8, 51. 11 0001333355.INDD 353 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder Models of Enquiry Enquiry along these lines can build on two superb studies that were early exceptions to historians’ inattention to money matters—one British, the other American, both published in 1985. Paul Johnson’s Saving and Spending: he Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 investigated how English wage earners created a plebeian version of the inancial arts to make money work for them. In he Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940, Daniel Horowitz contrasted how Americans spent their income with how social critics thought they should. he landmark status of both these books owes something to the authors’ perception that what people do with money says a good deal about what people value. Should anyone need convincing that the study of money matters can do more than simply ill a hole in the history of consumption, that it can produce fresh interpretations of larger historiographical questions, Paul Johnson’s Saving and Spending will satisfy all doubts. In this book Johnson took up a familiar problem in labour history, the low wages and unreliable employment of industrial workers. But instead of focusing on workers’ relation to trade unions, the response to low wages emphasized by let-leaning historians from Engels to Hobsbawm, Johnson turned away from institutional labour history in order to pay attention to how working-class households spent the little money they had. Working with unused data on working-class savings, insurance policies, and spending patterns, Johnson learned that workers deined themselves at least as much through bourgeois concepts such as status as they did through collective identities like trade unions. ‘Although the means adopted were sometimes mutual and collective,’ Johnson concluded, ‘the goal was always personal and competitive; self-help sometimes, self-interest always.’13 Without minimizing class consciousness where it could be found, Johnson’s attention to money matters led him to challenge the dominant interpretive tradition of British labour studies. Collective economic eforts by workers, he argued, were not necessarily a prelude to trade unionism. On the contrary, the spending patterns of British workers showed that many were less interested in building an industrial democracy than in advancing their social position in the neighbourhood. Saving and Spending achieved an additional accomplishment, which was to reconstruct the rationality of working-class money management practices roundly condemned by self-help enthusiasts for being wasteful, pointless, and even morally wrong. Against this view, Johnson demonstrated that workers who bought burial insurance and pawned personal possessions valued savings as much as the middle class, though the circumstances of their lives called for diferent forms and understandings of thrit. Johnson’s data showed that the conditions in which working-class households lived made middle-class approaches to saving and spending totally unrealistic for them. 13 Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: he Working Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 232. 0001333355.INDD 354 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  Deprived of adequate and dependable streams of income, working-class households developed their own inancial arts, ingenious methods, and institutions calculated to make the most of intermittent cash lows. Saving and Spending is a Baedeker’s Guide to these strategies, beginning with insurance plans (the most popular form of savings among workers) and extending to single-purpose savings plans, savings clubs, cooperative retailing, and sources of credit inancing such as hire purchase and pawning. In each case, Johnson argued that what appeared to be inancial madness to comfortable middle-class observers oten made sense in the circumstances faced by workers. Pawning, for example, certainly cost more than drawing from one’s own savings account, while the very act of putting possessions in hock suggested a deplorable indiference to the sanctity of private property. But in Johnson’s sympathetic view, working-class people considered belongings like luxurious bedding and Sunday clothing as forms of capital that could be given up for cash when bad times required it. Allowing the dynamics of capitalism to invade the sanctity of the home in this way shocked middle-class observers, but as a savings strategy it made sense for workers. To conirm the rationality of working-class saving and spending, Johnson pointed to the decline of pawning ater 1909. When state-sponsored pensions, health insurance, and unemployment beneits became available, workers shited their savings strategies toward investment in old-age endowment policies, exactly the opposite of what one would expect if the working class was proligate by nature, as critics alleged. A quarter-century ater publication, Saving and Spending continues to be instructive. Later we will consider how Johnson’s defence of working-class shrewdness invites new narratives for the history of thrit based on understandings of saving more capacious than putting one’s tuppence in the bank. Also worth emulating is Johnson’s adept use of sources. All students of money matters face a diicult problem: while corporations issue annual reports, households do not. To form his conclusions, Johnson worked with statistical and qualitative evidence taken from a vast menu of sources including autobiographies, social surveys, institutional records, and government documents. An even more astonishing command of dissimilar forms of evidence can be found in Margot Finn’s he Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914, an important study of formal and informal working-class credit arrangements that adds novels, prison records, and court documents to the mix used by Johnson.14 On this model of source material, historians of the inancial arts must be positively omnivorous. A diferent way to proceed can be found in Daniel Horowitz’s he Morality of Spending. Like Johnson, Horowitz surmised that people’s values are revealed in how they spend their money. Trusting that this insight could open up new ways to contribute to debates scholars were having about the arrival and impact of consumer society, Horowitz pulled together two main sources of evidence: a set of landmark budget studies published between 1875 and the late 1930s, and the writings of those who commented on them. Of his sources, Horowitz observed, ‘Household budget studies are rich reservoirs 14 Margot Finn, he Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 0001333355.INDD 355 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder of information that historians are only now beginning to tap.’15 A quarter-century later these words are still true, and Horowitz remains the best guide to these indispensable sources. Empirical documentation of how rural, industrial, and, later, middle-class households spent their money began in the early years of social science. In France, the mining engineer Frederic le Play published in 1855 his monumental Les Ouvriers Européens, a set of thirty-six ine-grained studies of the material and moral lives of European families representing various nationalities and social groups. Le Play’s methods were widely inluential. One admirer was Carroll D. Wright, head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (MBSL), who in 1875 conducted the irst major American investigation into the expenditures of working-class households. Wright’s 1875 report is the irst of twelve budget studies examined by Horowitz. In the beginning, Horowitz hoped that study of budget data would reveal changes in patterns of household expenditure over time. It did: by the end of the period surveyed, families spent proportionally less on food compared to items in the ‘miscellaneous’ category (i.e., other than food, clothing, and shelter), with the biggest shit occurring between 1875 and 1907.16 But the more Horowitz lingered over the budget studies, the more potential he saw in them for addressing other questions, and he predicted: Once more fully regained as sources, analysis of the data can sharpen the debate over when the United States became a consumer culture; help reveal the changing styles of life of diferent social and ethnic groups; enable us to chart more precisely the development of a market economy; make it possible to enhance the examination of the contributions of husbands, wives, and children to the family economy; and shed light on the balance between defensive and acquisitive patterns of spending.17 his list scratches only the surface of possibilities for using budget studies to investigate money matters. Reading he Morality of Spending is like following a social worker a century ago into tenements and bungalows to look in on families while they are eating. For example, in the 1875 MBSL study of 397 families, we learn that Household #223, a French-Canadian family composed of two parents and ive children, ate ‘bread, butter, gingerbread, molasses, tea’ for supper. he family’s income that year was $650. Of that amount, $385 came from the father’s mill job and the rest from the two older boys, who were sent out to work. All but $24.58 of the family’s income was spent on food, clothing, and shelter. he budget shows that the family was debt free, but there is no indication of savings. ‘Family dresses poorly’, noted the investigator, ‘and looks pale and unhealthy’. Overall, about half of the families in the MBSL survey reported putting money aside; the average amount saved was 3 per cent of income. he most commonly reported spending on ‘sundries’ went on newspapers, organizational memberships, and church contributions. 15 Daniel Horowitz, he Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), xx. 16 Ibid., 173–4. 17 Ibid., xx. 0001333355.INDD 356 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  Only a few families spent money on recreation, travel, consumer durables, or health care. Other budget studies examined by Horowitz report similar kinds of data for a variety of types of households: working-class families in New York City in 1907, salaried middle-class families from across the nation in 1912, Berkeley college professors in 1927, and so on. Incredibly rich data sources, budget studies could keep social historians busy for a long time. But they have to be used cautiously. Horowitz recognized that budget studies are not objective documents at all but ‘morality plays’ dramatizing the attitudes of the researchers behind them. Horowitz concluded that before he could use budget studies to write a social history of saving and spending, it was necessary to apply the questions and methods of intellectual history to surveys of household expenditure. he researchers who compiled the budget studies thought their rigorous methods were value free. But the very categories they used to describe spending behaviours, as well as the spending they noticed and the kinds of spending they ignored (not to mention the revealing notes they scribbled in the margins of their reports), all betrayed attitudes about consumption that say as much about how investigators thought people should spend their money as they say about actual household spending. For this reason, Horowitz decided to make the investigators’ moral outlook the primary focus of his study. his means he Morality of Spending is not a straightforward social history. On the other hand, it is not a purely intellectual history either, and herein lies a strength of the book as a model. Horowitz recognized that traditional categories of historical work it his subject and sources poorly. herefore, he hoped to accrue dividends from a blending of approaches, methods, questions, and disciplinary ields, a cross-cutting approach that has become characteristic of work done on money matters. At the time Horowitz was working on he Morality of Spending, a strong consensus among historians had developed around a powerful narrative explaining the growth of a culture of consumer capitalism in the United States. he dominant narrative described the 1920s as a watershed moment in American history, the tipping point when a nineteenth-century ‘producer ethic’—an ethos of restraint, thrit, and work, arising from conditions of scarcity—was surpassed by a twentieth-century ‘consumer ethic’ that took abundance for granted and found expression in lifestyles of release, therapeutic indulgence, and fun. In this linear account of the past, Horowitz expected to ind that attitudes toward saving and spending were recalibrated in the ‘Prosperity Decade’ from unbending condemnations of thritlessness toward a more relaxed acceptance and even celebration of freer spending. But this is not what he found. At least, it was not a suiciently rich account of the evidence. Horowitz allowed that between 1875 and 1940, budget investigators and social critics did change their thinking considerably on the persistent question of what a rising standard of living meant for American lives and culture. But the shit in attitudes was not from opposition to acceptance. Rather, Horowitz argued, elite observers exchanged one type of moralism for another, hoping in both cases that better spending habits would elevate the moral lives of others. Traditional moralists such as Carroll Wright focused on the alleged proligacy of workers’ and immigrants’ households. In contrast, modern 0001333355.INDD 357 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder moralists, such as the progressive social critics Robert and Helen Lynd, became alarmed by what they saw as the vacuous conformity of the middle class. Traditional moralists looked at the convivial drinking of working men and expressive ethnic customs of immigrants and worried about the loss of self-control. Modern moralists witnessed the integrity of working-class life and immigrant folk cultures being replaced by an insipid, homogenized middle-class way of life; they feared the power of greedy corporations and mass society. Traditional moralism attended to individuals; modern moralism directed criticism against institutions and social systems. Traditional moralists wanted to instruct households in the virtues of character, hard work, and restraint, and train them for the proper enjoyment of leisure, disdaining the false pleasures of commercial goods and experiences for the true joys of a so-called higher life found principally in Culture. Modern moralists hoped to liberate the gullible masses by introducing them to noncommercial lives passionately lived, viewing Culture as a revitalizing force for bohemian individuality. What both traditions of moralism shared was a belief that aluence is corrupting. Both believed in a higher life threatened by commercialism and wealth. Both shared a narrow view of the function of goods, believing commercial goods and experiences to be therapeutic devices that compensated for lack of access to a good life, which traditional moralists deined as personal virtue and modern moralists conceived of as fulilling labour. ‘For both sets of observers,’ Horowitz concluded, ‘the danger was that people selected escape, not renewal; false pleasures, not true ones.’18 Ater he Morality of Spending, simple, linear accounts of a ‘revolution in manners and morals’ relating to consumption and spending became increasingly recognized as untenable. Modern moralism did not expire in 1940. Horowitz followed he Morality of Spending with additional explorations of money matters, presenting an intellectual history of the moral consequences of post-Second World War aluence and a biography of the 1950s social critic Vance Packard. hough Americans are oten stereotyped as carefree consumers, until someone corrects Horowitz, ambivalence is the key word for describing how Americans have responded to the moral quandaries of money. For those interested in studying the social history of money management, he Morality of Spending (which might have been better titled he Immorality of Spending) can be read as a cautionary tale about the limitations of a moralistic outlook. A deep anxiety about the moral consequences of wealth is an old and enduring part of the American national tradition, as Daniel Shi made clear in he Simple Life: Plain Living and High hinking in American Culture.19 his inding is corroborated in he Morality of Spending when Horowitz identiies a common language Americans (and others) have used to talk about consumption, a way of thinking and talking about money whose key idioms are decadence, self-control, corruption, and the need to get back to aspirations higher than getting and spending. hose who study the inancial arts from the precincts of the liberal arts oten write from within this tradition, which in unguarded moments shows 18 Ibid., 166. See the introduction and epilogue to Daniel Shi, he Simple Life: Plain Living and High hinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 19 0001333355.INDD 358 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  itself in sneering references to Wal-Mart shoppers, SUV drivers, and the super-sized citizens of a fast-food nation. Although criticizing how other people spend their money may be a therapeutic way of reairming one’s own commitment to righteous ideals and sophisticated forms of Culture, Horowitz’s critique of modern moralism reveals the limitations of such an outlook. For one thing, a condescending eye inevitably blinds critics to the social meanings people give to their consumption. As an alternative to moralism, Horowitz’s proposal for a reciprocal model ofers a better approach, ‘one that emphasizes the power of the economic system and elites to set the framework of consumer culture but does not forget the ability of people, within limits, to shape the meaning of their consumption patterns.’20 In addition to recommending a fruitful way of thinking about money matters, he Morality of Spending ofers numerous jumping-of places for future research. Budget analyses will be an important source of information for future studies, allowing us to learn more about the gendering of money management as well as the inancial practices of immigrant, ethnic, and other unstudied groups. A stunning example of the possibilities comes from John McClymer, who used data taken from the 1902 Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor to learn what material culture workingclass families aspired to have and what strategies they used to aford what they wanted. he MBSL data is eye-opening for what it reveals about American dreams and workers’ realities. he average gap between family expenditures and paternal wages was $253, a hety 29.9 per cent of total spending. Conventional wisdom, in line with Mr Micawber, dictated that families should live within the bounds of the paternal breadwinner’s earnings. But few families in McClymer’s sample were content to live within their means. What did people do? About a third put children out to work. Another third took in boarders. In all cases, housewives found various ways to take up the slack. his means that since at least 1900, the main breadwinner’s income has been inadequate to realize an American standard of living. McClymer’s indings also imply that consumer credit can be viewed as the historical replacement for income-enhancing strategies such as child labour.21 An important question that needs following up is the extent of the inluence of inancial advice givers, which remains unclear. he inancial arts have had many teachers. We will not know how representative or inluential Horowitz’s moralists were until we know more about other sources of moral authority on money matters, including ministers, novelists, editors, popular economists, psychologists, business writers, teachers, songwriters, and the self-appointed apostles of thrit. At the end of Father Abraham’s sermon on ‘he Way to Wealth’, Benjamin Franklin has Poor Richard observe: ‘he people heard it, approved the doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary.’ Franklin’s pessimism notwithstanding, the inluence of inancial advice literature like the advice books of Samuel Smiles or Fan Li’s long-lived Golden Rules for Business Success is an important subject that remains to be explored. 20 Horowitz, he Morality of Spending, 168. John F. McClymer, ‘he “American Standard” of Living: Family Expectations and Strategies for Getting and Spending in the Gilded Age’, Hayes Historical Journal, 9/3 (1990), 20–43. 21 0001333355.INDD 359 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder Also needed are micro-histories that can illuminate and supplement what we already know about general patterns of saving and spending. he black box of the household economy will be hard to unlock without data and testimony from householders themselves. Here the horizon of possibility is suggested by recent studies in retailing history making use of account ledgers and records belonging to particular merchants. hese ine-grained studies hold many surprises for understanding past worlds of goods and commercial relations.22 As an example of the promise of micro-history approaches, consider the letters of Walter T. Post, a late nineteenth-century American railroad clerk whose correspondence takes us inside one household’s inancial decision-making.23 Born on a Michigan farm in 1867, Walter Post attended a Detroit business college and took a job in 1889 as an accountant with the Northern Paciic Railroad. From the day he arrived in St Paul, Minnesota until losing his job seven years later, Walter wrote weekly letters to his parents recounting his thoughts, activities, and inances, sometimes with monthly budget igures recording outlays to the penny. he correspondence ofers a window into the money management of a household over important shits in the life cycle of a young man, and then a woman, who aspired to bourgeois respectability. Conspicuous in the letters is the Posts’ conident use of credit, which will surprise those who believe in a golden age of American thrit when middle-class people supposedly never went into debt. Walter Post made use of credit from the irst day he arrived in St Paul. By the spring of 1895, the Posts owed money to the dentist, the doctor, the grocer, the butcher, a tailor, the hardware store, and a sewing-machine agent. hey owed money on their furniture and stove, renewing loans to a department store several times over. To satisfy some creditors Walter tapped a brother for loans. Walter’s disposable income that spring was about $10 a month; the Posts’ debts totalled $78.50. Were the Posts atypical? Walter thought so. He portrayed himself as the thritiest of the dozens of clerks who worked in the St Paul oice, clerks who were occasionally ired for drunkenness, for gambling, and for having their wages garnished by lenders. Walter probably exaggerated his prudence to justify himself to his parents. Still, the 1890 US census calculated that American households on average that year owed about $880. his is a remarkable amount of debt given that the average annual wage of workers at the time was $475, and that the igure, based on recorded mortgages, does not include the kinds of debts carried by Walter and Lilly Post. Post’s letters bring alive a saying of the late nineteenth-century celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher: ‘If a young man will only get in debt . . . and then get married, these two things will keep him straight, or nothing will.’24 But the most striking feature of the letters is Walter Post’s thinking on inancial management. Perusing the debt totals, we might accuse the Posts of wasteful overspending. But that is not how Walter interpreted his spending and borrowing. In a letter to his 22 See Anne Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Diane E. Wenger, A Country Storekeeper: Creating Economic Networks in Early America, 1790–1807 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 23 Walter T. Post letters, Box P1040, Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul, MN. 24 Beecher, quoted in P. T. Barnum, Dollars and Sense (Boston: Eastern Publishing Co., 1890), 49–50. 0001333355.INDD 360 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  brother Charlie, Walter conided: ‘I have to do some awful close iguring to make ends meet, and then they don’t meet.’ To his father, Walter complained: ‘We were paid of today but all the money is spoken for before I get it almost.’25 he impression let by Walter’s letters is not that of a reckless spender but more of a frazzled budgeter applying all the inancial arts he knows to the diicult problem of afordability. Despite his money worries, Post felt that the debts he incurred were beneicial for achieving the life he and Lilly wanted. Comparing the costs of renting a house versus boarding, Post conceded that a few more years of boarding would have enabled the couple to put aside $150 of his salary at a savings bank. ‘But now we have $202.80 worth of furniture,’ he countered. ‘And we might have had to use some of the money in the Bank so you see we are ahead a good deal.’26 It is an interesting logic. hough the Posts still owed money on their tables and chairs, Walter regarded their furniture as a form of savings, and he recognized that the liquidity of a bank savings account was to him a constant temptation to fritter money away on insubstantial expenditures. On display in the letters, then, is an important shit in the middle-class understanding of thrit, a transformation happening well before advertisers, economists, and credit advocates in the 1920s began promoting ‘spending-to-save’ credit plans. To say that borrowing money can be thrity sounds odd, but only if we assume a static deinition of thrit. he reality is that thrit has a history, and the rise of consumer credit is a chapter in that story. he history of thrit is one of several problem areas to emerge in the scattering of work on money matters that followed Horowitz’s he Morality of Spending and Johnson’s Saving and Spending. ‘Scattering’ is the key word here; the history of money matters is less an industrious exchange in which scholars build on each other’s work than a lonely dance loor where a few bold souls sally forth looking for someone to hook up with. Still, problem areas can be discerned, beginning with the concept of thrit and how it has changed over time. A second focus of enquiry asks comparative questions. With regard to saving and spending, have consumer societies moved in similar directions? How have they difered, and why? In both problem areas, historians have called into question well-known assumptions about the history of saving, debt, and credit, ofering new insights that are relevant to public policy on personal inance. The History of Thrift Many believe today’s overspent Americans are in headlong retreat from a thritier past, when people saved their money and lived within their means. ‘People have changed their view of debt,’ wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in he Aluent Society. ‘hus there has been an inexplicable but very real retreat from the Puritan canon that required an individual to save irst and enjoy later.’ Narratives describing a decline in the moral culture of 25 26 0001333355.INDD 361 Post letters, to Charlie, 20 January 1896; to his father, 2 April 1895. Post letters, to his father, 2 April 2 1895. 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder economic decision-making were popularized in the 1920s by Horowitz’s modern moralists. hey gained legitimacy from historian David Tucker’s he Decline of hrit in America, which argued that ‘installment buying required a moral revolution against the Puritan ethic.’ Most famously, Daniel Bell asserted in he Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that ‘the greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit.’27 he belief that thrit today is on life support, that the story of American saving and spending is the story of a fall from the heights of thrit on which previous generations lived and contributed to national greatness, is such a powerful narrative for understanding the history of saving and spending that it is helpful to give it a name. I have called it ‘the myth of lost economic virtue’.28 hat thrit has declined seems beyond obvious. Oddly, dating the decline is not. Some recall a golden age of saving before the 1990s, before pay day lending and home equity loans that allowed mortgage holders to treat equity investments as a personal ATM machine. Others believe thrit died in the 1960s, killed of by credit cards. Some date the end of the golden age of inancial prudence quite precisely to 1966, the year National hrit Week quietly expired. But if we ask why National hrit Week was necessary in the irst place, why the YMCA and thousands of savings banks mobilized annually ater 1919 for campaigns of savings evangelism, it is possible to interpret the creation of National hrit Week as a sign that long before credit cards the nation already had a problem with thrit. Promoters of National hrit Week blamed the demise of thrit on the instalment plan, which made ownership of consumer durables a hallmark of American consumption. Many factors, then—the appearance of new forms of consumer credit, the expansion of a ‘buyosphere’ oriented to spending, pleasure, and fun, along with the very real dismantling of a cultural apparatus for the promotion of savings—have made it easy to believe in a past golden age of thrit. But the myth of lost economic virtue has not held up well under recent historical scrutiny. Historians looking into saving and spending in the United States are replacing declension narratives with interpretations more respectful of contrary evidence and more sensitive to the survival of thrit as a surprisingly adaptable ethos operating across time and economic contexts. For starters, it has become increasingly hard to locate a time in the past when American households were not using credit—oten reluctantly, sometimes zealously—to solve the problem of afordability. Bruce Mann summarizes dozens of social histories when he observes that ‘debt was an inescapable fact of life in early America’, evident in the pervasiveness of debts owed and owing in probate inventories, the predominance of debt actions in civil litigation, the vast number of surviving account books for individuals and merchants, and the fact that promises to pay were a major medium of 27 Preston William Slosson, he Great Crusade and Ater, 1914–1928 (Macmillan Co., 1930), 181; John Kenneth Galbraith, he Aluent Society (Houghton Milin, 1958), 200; David Tucker, he Decline of hrit in America (Praeger, 1991), vii–ix, 99–155; Daniel Bell, he Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976), 21. 28 Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 22–31. 0001333355.INDD 362 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  exchange. his river of red ink lowed well into the nineteenth century, as I showed in Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit. he dilemma for Americans, Mann points out, was that owing other people money is the antithesis of the revolutionary ideal of independence, yet in a ‘republic of debtors’ few have escaped the creditors’ nets.29 Even the most unassailable presumption of the myth of lost economic virtue—that the ethos of thrit is a legacy from Puritan Christianity—appears to need correction. Stephen Innes and others have underlined crucial diferences between the Puritan moral economy and visions of thrit that came later. Unquestionably, Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic valued an ethos of restraint that had something to do with the legitimization of capitalistic practices. But unlike Franklinian acolytes of saving, Puritan merchants and tradesmen did not understand thrit as ‘the Way to Wealth’ or as a technology of moral perfection. In the Puritan culture of discipline, the imperative to save was always deined and restricted by moral and theological ends that distinguish it from the modern capitalist’s self-oriented motivation to save. hus, when modern moralists decry the loss of the so-called Puritan ethic in saving and spending, it is doubtful they are thinking about Puritan thrit at all.30 he crucial point here is that thrit has a history, though it has not had historians. No concept has been more important than thrit for shaping the moral culture of economic life under capitalism. hrit is a habit that the Puritans correctly recognized as having deep theological and anthropological implications, inding expression in a multitude of practices and dispositions grounded in an ethos of care. Standing on more capacious understandings of thrit, historians will ind it possible to move beyond familiar riseand-fall narratives in which parsimonious saving is invented by the Puritans, achieves its greatest inluence among the Victorians, and then in the late twentieth century withers away and dies. In the place of such overly simple Anglo-American histories of ascent and decline, we need more complex narratives of institutional and cultural realignment in which the meaning and practice of thrit ebbs and lows across time and from place to place, bufeted by historical transformations yet capable of being revived and realigned in manifold, oten cross-cutting ways of restraint and release. If thrit is understood as the making of wealth out of scarcity, then it will be possible to see how dynamic and versatile thrit has been, as relevant to uses of time, natural resources, manpower, and human passions as it is to money. hrit will then belong not just to Puritans and moralists, but also to peasants, monks, revolutionaries, conservationists, environmentalists, civil rights activists, philanthropists, social protestors, and others 29 Ibid.; Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–5. 30 Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: he Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: Norton, 1995); James Calvin Davis and Charles Mathewes, ‘Saving Grace and Moral Striving: hrit in Puritan heology’, in Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter (eds.), hrit and hriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order From the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 0001333355.INDD 363 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder committed to an ethos of restraint. When thrit is historicized, we will ind it has been reimagined many times and is a more malleable concept than generally recognized.31 A striking example of the adaptability of thrit comes from the work of scholars examining the development of consumer credit in the United States. In Financing the American Dream, I contested the common view that instalment buying undermined inancial prudence by making it easier for people to live hedonic lives oriented to instant gratiication. In my research, I noticed that users of instalment credit oten maintained that, for the duration of their repayment periods, they were forced to cut out expenditures on fancies of the moment, put aside money for the monthly bills, and work diligently at one or more jobs to guarantee a dependable supply of income. Impressed by their testimonies, I shited my attention from the moment of sale to the lived experience of credit over time, which led me to argue that the greatest contribution consumer credit made to American consumer society is the way it enforced discipline, hard work, and the channelling of productivity toward the acquisition of durable goods. Once consumers step onto the treadmill of regular monthly payments, it becomes clear that consumer credit is not about ‘easy payments’ or a rejection of thrit, but is a new form of selfdiscipline supporting new variants of thrit. ‘Easy payment!’ exclaimed an immigrant housewife to a journalist in 1912. ‘Hard payment it is! Easy payment with everybody workin’ their nails out!’32 he evidence I ofered for the view that consumer credit represents a new kind of thrit was suggestive, but thin. I made use of arguments from authorities such as the economist E. R. A. Seligman, whose massive study of consumer inance in the 1920s demonstrated that money spent on the instalment purchase of consumer durables was a genuine form of saving.33 I related anecdotes about individuals who used credit to discipline their spending, including Walter Post, who in 1895 complained to his parents, ‘I have to pay $10 this month on my stove. . . . We have to squeeze and pinch awful hard to make ends meet until we get everything straightened up.’ But the evidence I presented let the case for credit-as-thrit merely plausible, not certain. And did the argument hold up at all once revolving credit and universal credit cards entered the picture? Since Financing the American Dream, succeeding histories of American consumer credit have extended and deepened the linkage between credit and thrit. Studies by Josh Lauer and Donncha Marron conirm the disciplinary power of credit as a means of social restraint and self-control, arguing that credit management has become an important technique for the formation of the self. Lauer’s history of credit reporting describes far-lung systems of disciplinary surveillance that since the 1850s have efectively regulated commercial and consumer behaviour. Lauer argues that the omnipresent gaze 31 At the time of writing, a major collection of interdisciplinary scholarship on the history of thrit is forthcoming from Oxford University Press: Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter (eds.), Capitalism and Moral Order: A Social History of hrit in America from the Puritans to the Present. 32 Mary Fields, ‘he Drama of Wages’, he American Magazine, 74 (November 1912), 76. 33 Edwin R. A. Seligman, he Economics of Instalment Selling: A Study in Consumers’ Credit, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1927), 1:272–4, 277. 0001333355.INDD 364 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  of the credit reporter made human beings legible and accountable to others in novel ways, generating a ‘inancial identity’ or ‘credit consciousness’, a new vision of the self, that promoted consumer spending while simultaneously supporting the virtue of selfcontrol expressed as ‘credit morality’. he message of credit morality—pay on time, refrain from overspending, follow a budget, think ahead—‘was a peculiar form of counter-propaganda set amid a sea of advertising designed to incite consumer desire.’ Borrowing from Foucault, Lauer presents modern credit education as an ideological discourse of self-government or ‘soul training’, a technique for self-formation that carries higher expectations for personal responsibility than older ways of household inance that allowed running up bills at stores and perhaps never paying at all.34 Similarly, Donncha Marron inds consumer credit to be a ‘regime of enforced saving’, making credit buying not an abandonment of thrit but a tighter embrace of the Puritan desire for self-discipline. According to Marron, credit accomplishes for consumers what Frederick Taylor’s industrial engineering did for workers: it optimizes individual performance. he curious thing is that what workers perceived as repression, consumers on a budget experience as a kind of freedom, a liberty based on the disciplined mastery of money, credit, and desire. Extending his historical sociology of consumer credit into the new millennium, Marron presents an ingenious argument to the efect that the credit score is to consumers today what the savings account passbook was to previous generations: a register for the moral evaluation of the self, measuring an ethos of personal peak performance. his means that even as credit cards have shited the nature of credit purchasing away from investments in durable goods, and even as lenders have discovered incentives to keep credit customers perpetually on the hook as a source of proit, the popular fascination with, and misunderstanding of, credit scores ensures that consumer credit continues to exercise an efective discipline on consumer behaviour. Like Lauer, Marron regards the credit score to be a lynchpin of personal identity formation. Far from encouraging hedonism, Marron concludes that consumer credit in the era of the credit score ‘has as its corollary a more all-round, inely grained management of the self.’35 Recognizing the disciplinary function of credit is important because it corrects a common misconception about the culture of consumption. Consumer societies are oten represented as endless carnivals of freedom for the desiring self, ofering boundless opportunities for pleasure, comfort, self-expression, and fun. But viable cultural orders cannot be purely hedonic. In every society a balance must be maintained between releases and restraints. he history of saving and spending reveals how the culture of consumption has generated its own mechanisms of restraint. Consumer credit is one of them. 34 See Chapter Five in Josh Lauer, ‘he Good Consumer: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in the United States, 1840–1940‘ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2008). Available from ProQuest: Paper AAI3328606 http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/ AAI3328606. See also Josh Lauer, ‘From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America’, Technology and Culture, 49 (2008), 301–24. 35 Donncha Marron, Consumer Credit in the United States: A Sociological Perspective from the 19th Century to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 182–185, 193–210. 0001333355.INDD 365 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder hrit lives on in other ways, too. Saving pennies is one way to be thrity, but it is not the only way to extract abundance from scarcity. Once time came to be counted as money, the desire to manage time with ‘time-payment plans’ proved irresistible. he new thrit imagined by Walter Post, defended by Seligman, and analysed by Lauer, Marron, and others simply extends the older thrit ethos from physical space—that is, from land, soil, resources, and money—to non-spatial time. But the dynamics of capitalism are not the only explanation for the development of time thrit: there is also the inexorable fact of human mortality. No one knows how much time they really have. Hence, the desire to be thrity with time, to turn its deicits into abundance, is at bottom a desire to cheat death, sickness, and debility of their inevitable victories. Traditional thrit recommends waiting and doing without, but in its obsession with space it ignores a truth about time that everyone feels: there may not be enough time to wait, and the postponement of gratiication has its own costs. Saving to buy a house, one has to pay rent. Saving to buy a wedding ring, lovers risk second thoughts. ‘Buying on time’ became popular because it removed the wait from wanting, producing surpluses in the present, whereas previously linear time was felt as a deprivation. Of course, time thrit, like traditional money thrit, can be mishandled to the point it becomes dysfunctional. Taken too far, penny-pinching becomes miserliness; too much buy now pay later yields a harried life. But this is just another reason to regard credit-based time thrit as a new variant of the thrit ethos. he sweet spot for thrit has never been easy to ind. Revisionist histories of thrit are inding traction with other scholars. In Rebirth of a Nation: he Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, Jackson Lears takes money matters very seriously in a dazzling account of the transformation of American yearnings. Lears discards the classic assumptions about monetization criticized by Viviana Zelizer, the suppositions that segregated money from human values, emotions, and relationships. On the contrary, Lears maintains, money was ‘more than merely a means of keeping people aloat, more even than the key to new realms of pleasure; it was also a mechanism for reinventing the self.’ For Lears, the connections between money management and the self become clearer once one gives up declension narratives charting a fall from saving to spending, from thrit to hedonism. In history, Lears reminds us, virtues are not replaced by their opposites but by new amalgamations of old ideas. What replaced Victorian thrit was not hedonism, he argues, but the ideal of ‘personal eiciency’. According to Lears, ideals of selhood promoting personal peak performance rest on a new understanding of the psyche. Older notions of thrit emerged from a psychology of scarcity that elevated concerns for the conservation of money and energy. But economic prosperity generated a psychology of abundance that reimagined thrit along the lines of a high-performance ethos. Under this new dispensation of the self, one needs more energy and discipline, not less.36 Still, newer understandings of thrit have not travelled very far beyond the history seminar. Social scientists continue to be inluenced by the myth of lost economic virtue, oten portraying the ‘credit card nation’ as a land of maxed-out, hyper-consumerist debtors deprived of an evaporating cultural heritage that once upon a time made household 36 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: he Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 56. 0001333355.INDD 366 8/8/2011 12:47:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  income an absolute limit on spending decisions.37 Despite their historical naivety, some of the studies in this vein show there is life yet in narratives of decline. For example, Avner Ofer, in he Challenge of Aluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950, marshals a wealth of interesting data to argue that ‘aluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ In other words, prosperity has undercut prudence. Humans have always struggled to control their ‘myopia’, Ofer concedes, meaning that it is natural to prefer present satisfactions to future ones. But Ofer believes that consumers in the past dealt with their myopia by exercising self-control and, when that was insuicient, by enlisting the aid of ‘commitment technologies’ enforced by third parties, such as savings clubs, payroll deduction plans, and, presumably, such obligations as home mortgages and automobile loans. What has happened since the Second World War, Ofer argues, is that credit-driven prosperity has negated many of the older commitment technologies, because ‘under aluence, the environment changes faster than commitment strategies can keep up with it.’38 While some of his conclusions have been challenged by fellow economic historians, Ofer’s fresh analysis and mobilization of data is impressive. Ofer’s distinction between internal disciplines and external restraints or ‘commitment devices’ are a useful organizing principle for future histories of saving and spending. But it is his thesis that should shake things up for historians of money matters. A reviewer commends the book for making ‘the charge of immoral consumerism freshly devastating.’ If so, then Ofer should be read in conjunction with he Morality of Spending, in which Horowitz faults modern moralists who believe everything is going to the dogs for misunderstanding the social dimensions of consumer spending. It may be that Ofer’s bleak point of view on aluence needs leavening from cultural history. Cultural historians, if they know anything, know at least this: somewhere between nostalgia for the past and belief in the myth of progress, two things are always happening. hings are getting worse, like Ofer says. And they are getting better. Comparative Saving and Spending he history of thrit is obviously not just an American story. As Sheldon Garon reminds us, organized, state-sponsored thrit promotion was an international movement of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.39 So a second problem area for scholars 37 See Robert D. Manning, Credit Card Nation: he Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit (Basic Books, 2001); Brett Williams, Debt for Sale: A Social History of the Credit Trap (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Teresa Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Westbrook, he Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (Yale University Press, 2001); George Ritzer, Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (Pine Forge Press, 1995). 38 Avner Ofer, he Challenge of Aluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1, 49, 74. 39 Sheldon Garon, ‘Savings-Promotion as Economic Knowledge: Transnational Insights from the Japanese Experience’, in Martin Daunton and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Worlds of Political Economy: Knowledge and Power in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 168. 0001333355.INDD 367 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder of money matters raises questions inlected with a comparative perspective. Across time and place, how have patterns of saving and spending matched up transnationally? Another question follows: do developments in any one society, particularly the United States, foretell for others converging paths to a common future? hus far, comparative studies have documented signiicant diferences among consumer societies with regard to savings rates and people’s willingness to incur debt. But the picture is complicated and irm conclusions are far from clear. What do we know about cross-country patterns of saving and borrowing? A considerable literature on this subject has been built up by economic historians attempting to identify stable transnational diferences. he policy orientation motivating this enquiry means that scholars have wanted to determine not just the what, but also the how and the why of variables afecting household decisions to save or to spend. Does the provision of a social safety net cause household savings to increase or decrease? Does it matter for savings rates what kind of social welfare is provided: means-tested or universal, health insurance or public pensions? What matters more to explain high levels of household debt—the provision of an old-age pension system, which reduces the need to save for retirement, or the availability of credit and a relaxation of strictures against borrowing? And so on. So far, on questions such as these there is little consensus. It calls to mind the old joke: ask three economists for an explanation, and you get four opinions. But some things are known. Charles Horioka of Osaka University has summarized data on saving and indebtedness from the G7 nations (the world’s seven major industrialized countries) for the recent past, 1985–2000. he irst surprise is that for most of this period the world’s most relentless borrowers were not the Americans but the Japanese, whose debts exceeded their disposable income in most of the years (in one year by 135 per cent!). During this period Americans were only average users of debt products with respect to the ratio of total liabilities to disposable income. As for the other countries, households in Canada and Great Britain out-borrowed those in the United States, while the French and Germans borrowed less than the Americans. Italian households borrowed least of all. he overall picture changes when household assets (savings and property) are set against liabilities. Compared to Americans, the Japanese have much higher net wealth, as do the Italians and the British. Americans, Germans, and the French have relatively fewer assets to balance against their borrowing, and the Canadians have least of all. hus, from 1985 to 2000, the Japanese borrowed the most, saved the most, and were the most inancially healthy. Canadians borrowed a lot and possessed the least wealth to repay their debts, making them the least inancially secure. he other countries traded places from year to year, somewhere in between.40 his summary of G7 data suggests how extraordinarily complicated it is to work with transnational comparisons. Also, when a clear picture does emerge, it oten surprises. 40 Charles Yuji Horioka, ‘Japan and the Western Model: An Economist’s View of Cultures of Household Finance’ (working paper presented at the ‘Cultures of Credit’ workshop, German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., 5–6 February 2010). 0001333355.INDD 368 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  Just as the history of thrit has been energized by the discovery that conventional wisdom on the subject is unreliable, comparative studies of saving and spending have likewise run up against deeply entrenched orthodoxies. For example, it is commonly believed that Americans are one-of-a-kind borrowers. At the same time, a popular theory of modernization presents the United States as an early adopter of economic innovations bound to be copied by other societies coming along behind. hus the history of crossnational saving and spending challenges both a myth of American exceptionalism and a myth of Americanization. he trick has been to confront one version of conventional wisdom without supporting the other. Going up against this opposed pair of orthodoxies, historians have contributed to a growing collection of country by country histories of saving, spending, and borrowing that challenges much of what people suppose. For example, everyone is aware that Asians, the Japanese in particular, are proliic savers. But Sheldon Garon has shown that Japanese households were not always thrity; they had to be made that way. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese saving rates trailed both the Americans and the British. To change this, the Japanese state and allied groups worked assiduously to shape the inancial and moral habits of the people by sponsoring savings and frugality campaigns that underwrote Japan’s military and nation-building projects. Even so, we should not get the wrong idea about the Japanese, urges Andrew Gordon. Despite their socialization into the ways of thrit, Gordon inds that consumer credit in Japan has a surprisingly long history of use. Indeed, in Gordon’s telling, the history of consumer borrowing in Japan loosely parallels the development of consumer credit in the United States. It is striking to learn, for example, that E. R. A. Seligman’s landmark 1927 defence of consumer credit was read and studied in Japan within months of its publication in the United States. In fact, the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce went even farther than Seligman in recognizing the disciplinary beneits of instalment credit, which they lauded as ‘not only extremely useful in order to live a disciplined life, planning a monthly budget of expenses; it also raises standards of living by allowing purchases of goods otherwise too expensive.’ By 1959, Japanese consumers were buying half their durable goods on time, an amount comparable to the American igure.41 Turning to Germany, the stereotype of the thrity German has been unpacked by Jan Logemann, who wonders why during the 1950s and 1960s the bourgeois ideals of saving and restraint in consumption persisted in West Germany even though credit availability was rapidly expanding. Logemann inds an answer in a combination of reasons: public policy (the West German state prioritized rebuilding a shattered infrastructure over household consumption), retailers’ apathy (they were not enthusiastic about following American models), bankers’ caution (another stereotype, but perhaps a true one), 41 Sheldon Garon, ‘Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and hrit: Savings and Frugality Campaigns in Japan, 1900–1031’, in Sharon A. Minichiello (ed.), Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 312–34; Andrew Gordon, ‘From Singer to Shinpan: Consumer Credit in Modern Japan’, in Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan (eds.), he Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia And the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 137–62. 0001333355.INDD 369 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder and householders’ attitudes (bourgeois Germans were reluctant to use inancial tools associated with poverty and destitution). But the interesting thing noted by Logemann is that while German savings rates remained very high, the purpose of saving shited from traditional thrit to a new ethos of ‘saving to spend.’ In other words, savings went from being an end in themselves to being an alternative means to consumption. Why? Logemann argues that the building of a social safety net meant that Germans did not have to save for retirement or illness, meaning they were free to save for consumption. Americans, by contrast, were not. Minimal social welfare in the United States meant that American households had to save for life’s eventualities, making credit inancing for consumption more tempting than in West Germany.42 Findings such as these move us beyond cultural stereotypes of thrity Germans, improvident Americans, and timeless Asian values in which thrit has pride of place. But to question essentialist myths is not to say that peoples everywhere are all the same, approaching money matters as calculating, rational actors following an identical logic of self-interest. If this were true, then the history of transnational money management would reveal a single track to the future with the most advanced economic societies leading the way, providing support for the myth of Americanization. However, this is not what historians have found. In the case of West Germany, so many older notions of money management lived on into the Wirtschatswunder, Jan Logemann concludes that the United States must be considered less a model for others than an outlier. Logemann speaks for virtually all studies of transnational saving and spending when he writes: One can hardly speak of an ‘Americanization’ of West German consumer society with regard to credit. While some proponents of consumer credit in Germany did look to the United States as a model for ‘modern’ forms of consumption, many others rejected this model. As it moved toward aluence in the postwar decades, West Germany—like many other European and Asian countries—struck a balance between elements of modern consumption and older notions of restraint and saving.43 A key theme, then, in comparative histories of money management is distinctiveness. In Japan, Sheldon Garon has uncovered the same ambivalence described by Logemann: ‘consumerist America loomed sometimes as a role model, but oten as the undesirable Other.’ Garon argues that Japanese thrit promotion campaigns, originally inspired by British models for encouraging saving, show that post-war Japan did not simply follow the American example. In the United States, the last year for National hrit Week was 1966. In Great Britain, the government abolished the 62-year-old National Savings Committees in 1978. But in Japan, even with the slow economic growth since the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s, institutions for promoting and investing household saving remain largely intact, despite criticism from American economists that the Japanese 42 Jan Logemann, ‘Diferent Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany in the 1950s and ’60s’, Journal of Social History, 41 (2008), 525–59. 43 Logemann, ‘Diferent Paths to Mass Consumption’, 546. 0001333355.INDD 370 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  are over-savers.44 Signiicantly, Garon’s emphasis on distinctive Japanese patterns of consumption is echoed by Andrew Gordon, the historian whose studies of consumer credit in Japan reveal surprising interactions and parallels between Japan and the United States. Gordon, too, insists that Japanese borrowing has gone its own way. Historically, most consumer credit in Japan was single-purchase instalment credit. For years banks were restricted from ofering revolving credit, and consumers were required to clear accounts monthly. hough the regulatory system was liberalized in 1992, and use of credit cards has skyrocketed, Japanese credit users continue to act as if the regulations were still in place. In 2007, 71 per cent of Japanese credit card bills were paid of in full at the end of the month, with most of the rest structured as traditional instalment debt. he number of Japanese who run a credit card balance in the American style is miniscule.45 In debates over coca-colonization, then, comparative histories of money management come down squarely on the side of those believing there has never been such a thing as the culture of consumption. Looking ahead, other questions beckon. Chief among them is the brute problem of household inance and prosperity. Of all the problem areas in the history of consumption, few rival money matters for direct relevance to public policy. What is the proper balance between saving and spending? Are some kinds of indebtedness better than others for sustaining economic stability and growth? What variables explain why some societies and social groups save more than others? Where and how should the inancial arts be taught? Questions such as these are too important to be let to economists and money management gurus, many of whom are inluenced by nostalgia for a lost golden age of economic virtue. Historians have a role to play in public conversations about money matters, as Sheldon Garon has recognized. At the beginning of an essay on the production of what he calls ‘economic knowledge’, Garon asks, ‘Could a government or groups, for instance, mould a “culture of thrit” that values high levels of savings while discouraging “excessive consumption”?’ Garon answers airmatively based on the case of Japan, ruefully observing that few Anglo-American economists today would consider such a question. Or historians, for that matter. But maybe they should. In the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008–09, some are saying the time has come when people should expect less of economists and more of economic history. he fact is, for all their sophisticated models, economists were unable to see the crisis coming. Indeed, they contributed to it with lawed theories of market behaviour. Since the crisis, there has been little agreement among economists about its ultimate causes. In a widely circulated essay, economist Robert J. Shiller of Yale University admitted that the best explanation of the inancial crisis is not a work of economic analysis at all, but a history: his Time is Diferent: Eight Centuries of Financial 44 Sheldon Garon, ‘Japan’s Post-war “Consumer Revolution”, or Striking a “Balance” Between Consumption and Saving’, in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (New York: Berg, 2006), 191; Garon, ‘Savings-Promotion as Economic Knowledge’, 184. 45 Gordon, ‘From Singer to Shinpan,’ 161–2. 0001333355.INDD 371 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogof.46 his book is almost entirely innocent of economic theory. If economists are going to pull back from mathematical models in order to make use of knowledge gleaned from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and history, then the history of money matters should have something to contribute. In the real world, money matters are inluenced by layers of emotion, social relationships, desire, and notions of the good. Here, mathematical models can only take one so far. Ultimately what is required is the kind of ‘fuzzy logic’ historians are trained to exercise, recognizing that the moral and social yearnings of human beings are not reducible to universal laws, but better captured in the richly braided narratives that are the hallmark of historical enquiry. Financialization Money management has always been hard. But over time it has also become complicated. his is a third problem area—in addition to thrit and comparative money management—that calls for historical analysis. In uneven ways, for some more than others, the era of monetization is yielding to a new age of inancialization. Whereas people once counted their money on two hands, today money lows through people’s lives in a bewildering variety of forms and the techniques for managing it grow ever more complex and diicult to master. As a macroeconomic concept, inancialization refers to a process whereby inancial markets, institutions, and elites gain greater inluence over economic policy and economic outcomes. here is less consensus about what inancialization means at the level of households. his is less a problem for historians than an opportunity to help determine whether inancialization is a faddish misstep corrected by the global meltdown of 2008, or a late stage of monetization, or a new era altogether. At bottom, the inancialization of society refers to the elevation of inancial management and Weber’s ‘calculating attitude’ to the self ’s highest vocation. Under monetization, workers brought home a pay cheque and the problem was how to disburse it. In the era of inancialization, wages and salaries are paid electronically through direct deposit and the problem is how to make income multiply though investments, speculations, and other strategic deployments. For the middle class, inancialization imagines a reversal of the home as a haven from the heartless world of economic striving. Instead, it aims to remake private life on the model of a business. Labour is replaced by risk. Repose is given up for speed, connectivity, and access to information. Randy Martin sums up inancialization this way: ‘Without signiicant capital, people are being asked to think like capitalists.’47 46 Robert Shiller, ‘A Crisis of Understanding’, Project Syndicate—A World of Ideas, March 12, 2010, <http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/shiller70/English>, accessed 15 April 2010. 47 Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 12. 0001333355.INDD 372 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  Put the central question of this chapter—how have people managed money?—to friends and someone will answer wryly, ‘Not well.’ he mismanagement of money becomes a default narrative as inancialization advances. he fact that failure is so readily acknowledged in this area suggests that the inancial arts, like the liberal arts, have a high cognitive threshold. Also, rather high expectations for the will. To see how much is expected of people in a inancialized world—and to suggest something of the extent of the problem area available for historical exploration—consider the pedagogy of modern inancial planning. he world’s largest inancial planning website is CNNMoney.com. Owned by the Fortune Money Group, a division of Time Warner, CNNMoney.com drew 10.8 million unique visitors per month in 2006. At CNNMoney. com, consumers are coached to replace common ‘rules of dumb’ with iner-grained economic intelligence on the myriads of money matters that confront all but the poorest. How does one estimate monthly mortgage payments? Calculate net worth? Determine how much insurance is enough? Ascertain when it makes sense to retire? For complex questions such as these, CNNMoney.com ofers calculators to assist rational thought. If that is not enough, the inancially befuddled can submit questions to an expert. Or, if the college years were wasted studying literature or history, one can go back to school for a remedial course in economics. ‘Money 101’ is CNNMoney.com’s version of a college-level course in personal inancial management. Ofering ‘a step by step guide to gaining control of your inancial life’, the syllabus guides inancial novices through twenty-three lessons covering topics such as ‘Making a budget’, ‘Controlling debt’, and ‘Investing in bonds.’ Exams at the end of each unit test for comprehension of key terms, concepts, and strategies: 4. he capitalized cost of a lease is: • • • • he value of the car at the start of the lease. he value at lease end. he interest charge. How much value was lost over the lease term. Hundreds of such questions deine what it means to be economically literate in the early twenty-irst century. What is the diference between a simple interest rate, a note rate, and the annual percentage rate (APR)? When does it make sense to consider a 401(k) versus a Roth IRA (USA), a bAV (Germany), a Japanese-version 401(K) (Japan), or to supplement one’s BSP and S2P with a PA (UK)? In a inancialized world the questions are not easy to answer or even, for the inancially illiterate, to understand. But as Niall Ferguson points out in he Ascent of Money, ‘he rewards for “getting it” have never been so immense. And the penalties for inancial ignorance have never been so stif.’48 Experts can be consulted but their knowledge comes with a price. ‘How costly?’ asks Avner Ofer in he Challenge of Aluence: ‘Well, precisely $149.95.’ Ofer refers to the cost of ESPlanner, a inancial planning sotware program developed by Laurence J. Kotlikof, 48 0001333355.INDD 373 Ferguson, he Ascent of Money, 14. 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi  lendol calder chair of the Department of Economics at Boston University, and Jagadeesh Gokhale, a former senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. he economists’ sotware uses ‘a patented dynamic programming method’ to maximize household living standards by applying the life cycle model of saving and consumption for which Franco Modigliani won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1985. Patented computer programming? Dynamic methods? Inter-temporal consumption models? We have travelled a long way from the Micawber Principle. When did inancial planning become rocket science? Must life really be an endless business school curriculum? Noting ESPlanner’s high cognitive demands, Ofer marvels, ‘It is just a tool, willpower is not included. And what did people do before it was invented?’49 hat is an excellent question. When historians can provide a complete answer, it will ill in an enormous blank spot in the history of consumer societies. Conclusion he history of the inancial arts can be compared to a jigsaw puzzle that has been dumped on a table. A few border pieces are in place, but it is not yet clear how other pieces it together. Readers should know that I have not described every piece of scholarship useful for understanding the history of saving and spending. Rather, to make sense of an inchoate topic, I have drawn attention to a few landmark enquiries worth emulating and pieced together several themes in which scholars are building on each other’s work. Although work on money matters lags behind other key subjects in the history of consumption, the good news is that there are more scholarly pieces to the puzzle than I have been able to mention. Moreover, it is encouraging to note that interest in money matters appears to be growing. Several important monographs appeared too late to be included in this survey and more are on the way. It will not be long until the state of the ield looks very diferent than it does now. For the time being, though, the most important thing to know about the study of saving and spending is this: nearly forty years ater Daniel Boorstin’s pioneer treatment of consumer credit in the United States, we lack comprehensive accounts of how money came into people’s lives, what they thought about it, how they managed it, and what monetization and inancialization have meant for modern societies. he bold, synthetic treatments I am calling for, similar to what has been done with advertising and retailing, may have to wait until more forays have been made to explore slices of the problem. hus far the lion’s share of attention has been given to debt, credit, lending, and borrowing, but these topics are far from exhausted. Meanwhile, the history of thrit and comparative analyses of transnational patterns of saving and spending ofer promising avenues for additional research. Greatly needed are histories examining inancial literacy and the pedagogy of the inancial arts, beginning with the literature of money 49 0001333355.INDD 374 Ofer, he Challenge of Aluence, 52. 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 08/08/11, SPi saving and spending  management advice and its reception by readers. Finally, we have much more to learn about how social identities have afected how money has been experienced, including variables such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and religion. Here especially researchers will not start from ground zero since much useful information has already been uncovered by social historians working on problems apart from the history of consumption. If there is any truth to the saying, ‘money talks’, then the inances of the household are a promising frontier of discovery. Without money, consumer societies are unimaginable. Without more histories of money matters, consumer society will be forever unfathomable. Bibliography Brewer, John, and Porter, Roy (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993). Calder, Lendol, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Finn, Margot, he Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Horowitz, Daniel, he Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Johnson, Paul, Saving and Spending: he Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Logemann, Jan, ‘Diferent Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and ‘60s’, Journal of Social History, 41/3 (2008), 525–59. McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., he Birth of a Consumer Society: he Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982). Reinhart, Carmen M., and Rogof, Kenneth S., his Time is Diferent: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Yates, Joshua J., and Hunter, James Davison (eds.), Capitalism and Moral Order: A Social History of hrit in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 0001333355.INDD 375 8/8/2011 12:47:02 PM