Weekend Reads
A few interesting pieces from the economic history world
An Oral History of the Fed’s Covid-19 Crisis, Financial Times
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve released all the full transcripts from its many scheduled and unscheduled FOMC meetings in 2020…The US central bank releases edited minutes from its meetings with a three week lag, but the full transcripts and accompanying internal agendas and presentation materials are only published after five years. And on January 16, the Fed released all the ones for 2020.
The Care Factory, Boston Review
In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.
The Economics of Regime Change, The Economist
REGIME CHANGE is often viewed as an economic turning point. Impoverished by years of fiscal indiscipline, price controls and state decay, nearly seven in ten Venezuelans believe their livelihoods will improve over the next year now that America has deposed their feckless dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Many Iranians bravely protesting against their theocratic rulers over sinking living standards must harbour similar hopes. Yet even though political moments can arrive abruptly, as Mr Maduro and the ayatollahs have learned, economic outcomes take longer to adjust.
Amazon’s Robot Revolution, Dissent
The word “automation” was coined by a vice president of production at the Ford Motor Company in 1947, one year after the largest strike wave in U.S. history. Automation didn’t refer to a specific technology, but rather to “an argument about the meaning of labor and its relation to technological change,” as historian Jason Resnikoff writes in his book Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work.
From Oil Nation to Wind Power Nation? An Exploration of Norway’s Turn to Offshore Wind Power, 1998–2024, Business History Review
This article examines how Norway, a hydropower-rich oil and gas producer, has sought to diversify its energy production since the late 1990s. It explores how and why leading Norwegian oil companies have attempted to redeploy into offshore wind, and how this redeployment has been shaped by political developments and sectoral interests. Through a four-part historical analysis, the article pays particular attention to the motives and interests of key stakeholders within the so-called oil–industrial complex, which encompasses both industrial and political actors, including employer and labor organizations. By integrating corporate and political perspectives, the article explains Norway’s attempt to transform from an “oil nation” to a “wind power nation” despite growing awareness of poor profitability and challenging conditions for offshore wind.
The Political Economy of Commodity Cartel Formation: The Case of Coffee, 1930-1940, Journal of Economic History
We inquire how a commodity cartel is created by studying the negotiations between Colombia and Brazil to stabilize the international coffee market in the 1930s. We show how differences among actors involved in the industry within the negotiating countries in terms of land ownership and type of coffee produced, prevented early cartelization agreements. Cartelization was only achieved when four factors converged: financial and infrastructural capability to store excess production, in-depth knowledge of the industry by the negotiating parties, full government support, and presence of a third-party enforcer. We combine an innovative game-theoretic approach with previously unexplored archival sources.
“Downtown Lowell is a Fun Place to Be”: Postindustrial Regeneration and the Making of the ‘New Liberals,’ 1974–1992, Modern American History
In the 1970s, deindustrialization and urban decay forced national, state, and local policymakers to focus more intensely on public-private partnerships as mechanisms of economic regeneration. This approach to postindustrial regeneration intersected with a rising generation of liberal politicians: labeled variously “Atari Democrats,” “neoliberals,” or “New Democrats,” they sought to orient the Democratic Party towards market-friendly politics. This intersection was evinced in the regeneration of Lowell, Massachusetts, a city dealing with decades-long industrial decline. Contrary to narratives that emphasize public-private partnerships only as instruments of privatization, however, Lowell’s experience exemplified how successful regeneration required an expanded role for the state: this article reinserts the “public” into “public-private partnership.” Excavating this reality in Lowell’s heretofore understudied history also demonstrates that New Liberals’ market-friendly political posture obscured deeper policy continuity with twentieth-century liberalism. Far from emerging locked into an ideological embrace of “neoliberalism,” the New Liberals sought to reimagine liberalism’s commitment to developmentalism.