Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States

by Jonathan Levy

A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era through the 2008 crash--and argues that we've come to yet another turning point.

Inspired by the market crash and great recession of 2008, Jonathan Levy began teaching a course to help his students understand everything that had happened in the economy to get to that point. Working from the beginning of U.S. history to the present, he found that capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages, separated by dramatic cataclysms that each forced a major turn in how the economy operated. In an ambitious, single-volume history of the United States, he reveals how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life.

The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era, the founding of the United States, and up to the outbreak of t he Civil War, a period of history where economic growth and output was the result of the spread of trade, but also largely dependent on enslaved labor and severely limited by what could be drawn from the land beyond subsistence farming. The Age of Capital traces the impact of the first major leap in economic development following the Civil War: the Industrial Revolution, when capitalists set physical capital down in factories to produce commercial goods, fueled by labor moving into cities. But, investments in the new industrial economy led to great volatility, most dramatically with the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929. The Great Depression immediately sparked the Age of Control, when the government took on a more active role in the economy, first trying to jumpstart it and then funding military production in World War II. Skepticism of government intervention in the Cold War combined with recession and stagflation during the 1970s led to a crisis of industrial capitalism, and the withdrawal of political will for regulation. In the Age of Chaos that followed, the combination of deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.

Today, in the aftermath of the Age of Chaos and in the midst of severe political discord, the nature of capitalism in United States once again is at a crossroads. In Ages of American Capitalism, Jonathan Levy proves that, contrary to political dogma, capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history--and it's likely changing again right now.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, American, Business

944 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 20, 2021

About the author

Jonathan Levy is Professor of History at Sciences Po. Before coming to Sciences Po, he was the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago and before that professor of history at Princeton University. Levy earned his AB from Yale University in 2000 and his AM (2003) and Ph.D. (2008) from the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“As the United States is often rightly taken to be the quintessential capitalist society, an economic perspective does afford a unique purchase upon its history. A history of the U.S. economy must encompass a great deal: demographic trends, trade patterns, growth rates, energy regimes, incentives, and productivity measurements. But it must also encompass Thomas Jefferson’s disdain for the English. Henry David Thoreau’s moral critique of commerce, and Herman Melville’s response. The corruptions of the Lincoln administration. Labor violence. FDR’s jokes. The persistence of white supremacy. The twentieth-century architecture of shopping malls. Second-wave feminists’ critique of marriage. The erotic quality of much stock market speculation. Reagan’s optimism about markets. Obama’s ambivalence about bankers. And much more…”
- Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States

When you survey American history, some major themes start to emerge. For one, there is the evolution from a weak central government to a strong one. Then there is America’s westward expansion, which turned the nation into a continental empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is also slavery, the Civil War, and its long, lingering aftermath. On these subjects you can find enough literature to last several lifetimes.

One topic that gets less attention is the economy of the United States. To be sure, it is never entirely ignored. That would be impossible, given the nation’s numerous financial panics, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession. But it is rare to see a concerted focus on economic issues, how those changed over time, and how we arrived where we are today.

That absence is the reason I picked up Jonathan Levy’s rather daunting Ages of American Capitalism. It is not always easy to read, and it has a number of flaws. Yet its tremendous scope and ambition certainly fills in more than a few gaps.

***

If nothing else can be said about Ages of American Capitalism, it is well-structured. The title gives the overarching principle. Levy divides the entirety of America’s existence – from 1660 to 2020 – into four different ages.

The first is the Age of Commerce, which covers America’s mercantilist beginnings as an English colony all the way to 1860. The second is the Age of Capital, exploring the ramifications of the Industrial Revolution in general, the American Civil War in particular, and ending with the Great Depression. Next, there is the Age of Control, during which the federal government stepped in to save capitalism from itself, and ushered in an era of prosperity that – for many – captures the ephemeral “American Dream.” Finally, there is the Age of Chaos, stretching from the 1980s until today, which saw the end of many regulations, a change in corporate ethos from long-term viability to short-term profits, and a growing gap between those who have a lot, and those who have a lot less.

Levy starts each of these four sections with a preface that summarizes, chapter-by-chapter, what is going to be covered. Each chapter is further divided by numerous subheadings, providing a roadmap for what is being discussed. All this careful planning has its benefits and its disadvantages. On the good side of the balance sheet, Levy makes sure you never get lost. Given that Ages of American Capitalism is as heavy as my pug – who is rotund – and runs to 741 pages of text, that ain’t nothing. The framework also has the virtue of really driving home its points. The downside is that things can feel repetitive to the point of pedantic. There is a textbook quality to the way that Levy – a professor – tells you what he’s going to say, says it, and then tells you what he said. While pedagogically effective, it does not make for the best reading experience.

***

One of the fundamental principles of writing is starting strong. It’s a bit like fishing. You need to get readers hooked, or else they’re not going to be around to read what you’ve written. Clearly, Levy is not an angler. Ages of American Capitalism has a high barrier to entry. Indeed, it felt like the literary equivalent of climbing a mountain, after which you get to ski down the other side. Tough going at first, with an eventual payoff.

In all honesty, I almost quit during the introduction. Levy’s bold opening gambit is to be stultifying as possible. Instead of a human-oriented set-piece to get things going, he gives you page after page of thesis statements, interspersed with tortured definitions of economic terms. Just reaching a working characterization of “capital” felt exhausting.

Things get better, but it takes time. The first section – just a shade under two-hundred pages – dragged more often than not. Mercantilism is just not inherently exciting, and Levy is unable to change that. This is not to say that things are unreadable. At the very least, it’s interesting to see the humble beginnings of the world’s eventually-largest economy, symbolized by the smalltime farmers who figured so largely into Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty.”

***

For me, Ages of American Capitalism finds its stride when it hits the 1850s and 60s, and maintains its pace till the end.

Levy does a really good job tracing the pecuniary antecedents of the American Civil War, specifically the economics of slavery. By the time the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, there were four million enslaved persons in the United States worth $3 billion. As Levy points out, that “human capital” exceeded the value of all American industrial stock. Slaves – by which, of course, I mean people owned by others by dint of their skin color – were also incredibly liquid, meaning they could be readily turned into cash. In short, those who owned slaves had a lot invested in the continuance of the system, to the point where they’d go to war to protect it.

The Civil War itself is also fascinating, for it marked a temporary suspension of the gold standard. Under the gold standard, every paper dollar issued had to be backed by physical bars of gold. Because gold bars are finite, the economy was constrained. Released from these limits, there came a roaring expansion, for both good and ill. The gold standard – and more broadly, monetary supply – is a motif that appears and reappears throughout.

Levy’s handling of the Great Depression is likewise sharp. In responding to the greatest economic crisis in the country’s history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the fateful decision to work at the margins of capitalism, rather than overhaul it completely. Instead of nationalizing commercial institutions, he propped them up. Instead of utilizing a purely Keynesian approach, he tried to balance the federal budget. He was willing to pay people, but they had to work for it. For this, Roosevelt was endlessly thanked by legions of capitalists. Just kidding. They called him a communist.

The final section – the aptly named Age of Chaos – lucidly deconstructs the “greed is good” portion of this tale, with the stock market soaring, wages stagnating, legendary corporations gutted to increase dividends, and tech billionaires replacing democracy with their fever dreams.

***

For the last several decades, Americans have increasingly come to believe that “liberty” and “capitalism” are the same thing. As a result, even minor critiques are drowned out by paeans to the “free market,” and its supernatural powers to make everything all right.

If nothing else, Ages of American Capitalism shows you that the magic of the markets is imagined. A totally free market has never existed anywhere. Moreover, throughout the lifespan of the United States, the government has had a finger on the scale, interceding to help others, and often redistributing wealth. Despite what you might have heard, much of that intervention and redistribution has gone to those already imbued with wealth and power: land giveaways to railroad companies; massive bank bailouts; preferred tax treatment of investors; the granting of super-special personhood to corporations.

Today we live in the most unequal period of all. The top 1% of Americans own over 30% of all wealth. Even those of us with money in the stock market have to satisfy ourselves with scraps, since around 90% of that wealth goes to the top 10%. When my parents were growing up, a chief executive officer and his employees might not live in the same neighborhood, but at least they occupied the same city. Now, CEOs live on a different planet, and their employees were just replaced by a robot. The first step to taking even the mildest ameliorative actions requires an acceptance that this might be a problem.

[Dax · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an impressive achievement by Levy. The pure scope of the work, and I am not talking about the page count, would be enough to deter most economists. We're covering the entire economic history of the United States here. This is not the first time such a book has been published, but it is the most up to date and therefore covers more ground than any American economics book before it.

Levy has divided this history into four parts and given each respective age a descriptive title. The points at which he demarcated each era are interesting in their own right; American colonization, Civil War, the World Wars, and the Reagan administration. It's kind of wild how drastically our economy changed in the 1980's and it's not surprising that those changes have lead to the disputes that we are seeing today regarding monetary and fiscal policies.

Alas, this is one of those instances where the size of the task smothers the details. It is inevitable that large portions of this book are dry; we're just covering too much ground to avoid it. The Gilded Age section was surprisingly on the dull side. Maybe that is a result of having read several books on the category already. The most interesting part is the final section that covers the Reagan administration onwards, which Levy has dubbed The Age of Chaos. I am guilty of recency bias here but the events that have lead us to where we are today are obviously going to be the most pertinent for us.

This is a work Levy should be proud of, however, and it is a worthwhile read. This is probably a book I will refer back to when discussing economics and fiscal policies in the future. A strong three stars.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: An economic history of the United States, dividing the history into ages of commerce, capital, control, and chaos.

I received an early e-galley of this book and by the time I worked through this massive tome, I thought it would be in print. Perhaps because of publishing delays, it won’t be out until April 20 of next year. If you want to read a history of the United States from an economic perspective, pre-order this book now.

Jonathan Levy covers the period from 1660 up until the present. He divides this history up into four ages. If you cannot remember all the economic developments, charts, booms and recessions, you need to remember just four words: commerce, capital, control, chaos.

The Age of Commerce spans the period of 1660 to 1860. The focus of this period, from the early colonies to the election of Lincoln focuses on trade, often the surplus of household economies exchanged for other needed commodities. One particular feature of American commerce was the “portable capital” of slavery, creating booms of sugar, tobacco, and cotton. One of the critical questions of this period was whether Hamilton’s centralized banking-fueled economy or Jefferson’s agrarian Empire of Liberty would prevail. Northern and Southern versions of commerce, the beginnings of an industrial society in the northeast and old northwest, and the slave economy of the south, laid the groundwork for the divisions leading up to the Civil War.

The Age of Capital spans the period from 1860 to 1932. The Civil War spelled the end of slave capital and led to a new period of industrial capital, first in the explosive growth of railroads, and then the illiquid capital of industrial production. All of this was made possible by the use of fossil fuels. One of the most fascinating chapters in this section, that illustrates the fusion of all these factors, is that on “Fordism.” The age was marked by cycles of boom and bust. A return to the gold standard in the 1920’s resulted first in a great boom, and then the greatest bust, the beginning of the Great Depression.

The inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt also opened The Age of Control. Levy delimits this as the years of 1932 until 1980, ending with the economic shocks of the late 1970’s. Levy uses the language of “control” because that was the focus of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. The critical thing was to deploy capital, employing breadwinners through infrastructure development programs, and providing income security through Social Security. Ultimately the war economy ended the depression as government funds were invested in war production. This was followed by the consumerism of the 1950’s, a fascinating chapter on the development of the post-war economy into which I was born. That began to unravel in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, particularly as OPEC controlled the price of oil at high levels, triggering the painful combination of high inflation and high unemployment we came to know as “stagflation.”

From 1980 to the present is Jonathan Levy’s The Age of Chaos. Things started with the “Volcker Shock,” a policy of high interest rates to bring down inflation (we bought our first house with the help of a determined realtor in this crazy period). Many of the promises of Reagan never materialized but the value of the dollar soared. Income growth shifted from labor to owners of property, whether real estate or stocks, an economy built less on production than speculation and an increasing disparity between laborers and those in the service economy, and investors. Home ownership was encouraged, with the granting of increasingly risky mortgages, bundled into investment instruments guaranteed by the big investment houses. In 2008 it all came crashing down, only to be put back together in the Obama administration with assets continuing to grow in value until the pandemic.

We are left wondering what will come next. While assets seem to grow, many see little growth in income. We face what may be an existential necessity to transition from the fossil-fueled economy. Levy believes we are at a place of reckoning. Will we keep repeating history, especially the recent history of Chaos? He proposes that this history is important to know as we determine our economic course in the future. I also think it critical in making sense of our past and how we’ve gotten to this place. Understanding the role of economics in historical events like the tensions leading to the civil war raises a question about the contemporary fault lines in our society. How do we make sense of our urban, suburban, and rural economies? Is this at all connected to our islands of blue in seas of red in so many parts of the country? I’m not persuaded that economics are the only factor but I also wonder if we cannot understand our history and contemporary social fabric without it. I’ve not seen anyone do quite what this book does, and the author has a good case for the importance of what he has done.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first few chapters of this book rocked my world and made me apply to an applied economics masters program. What a masterful assessment of power and economic theory. I lost interest in the last chapter or so partly because they were too close to our current age and therefore the insight was less helpful. The historically mediated explanation of how our government has made the economic choices it has and with what effects is visual. Economists usually love to dwell in theory and not so much in what we have actually done and how it actually worked.

[Brandon Westlake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that is for a select audience. As a history teacher, I tend to read voraciously about America's past, and have always had my eyes out for an economic history that doesn't get boggled down in theory. I was hoping that Levy's book would be the one I was looking for but was mistaken.

His book is great if you are looking for a narrative history about markets and economic systems (beginning with mercantilism and the rise of capitalism after the European discovery of the western hemisphere). He does a fine job defining his subject and goes to great length to explain his rationale for writing it in the first few pages, but I quickly learned that it was not about how capitalism affected the lives of Americans, rather, the system itself is the main character of the story.

This is not to be taken as a negative review; I am just trying to be clear what this book is. Economic history is not my strong suit, and my weak background made some of what I was reading inaccessible. I think Levy's writing is well-constructed; he keeps complicated ideas in basic sentence structure, which provides a manageable means of digesting information.

If you are looking for a book that will trace how the fundamental workings of capitalism have changed throughout American history, you should start with this book.

[Gary Moreau · Rating 4 out of 5]

What makes Jonathan Levy’s book so informative is that it is truly a parallel history of its politics and its economics. And only by viewing these two intertwined paths side by side can you truly understand the myth of the American free market.

America’s politics and its economics have never, since the country’s founding, been separated. The state has been an integral part of everything economic to an extent that would make the most rabid socialist gasp in horror. The only difference is that while the Marxist state stood side by side with the proletariat, and Mao built the number two economy in the world on the support of farmers, America built its economic marvel on the backs of, and for the benefit of, the owners of financial capital.

That’s not all bad, mind you. It takes workers, farmers, and the owners of capital to build a modern economy. The tension comes when there is a lack of balance between the importance the state attaches to each.

And there can be little surprise that America’s politicians have put the owners of financial capital at the top of their list of priorities. Politicians, after all, can do nothing without power, and power comes via the electoral process, a process that is today fueled by obscene amounts of money. And who has all that money?

The American economic narrative is a misleading tale of meritocracy and free markets. The Horatio Alger-based myth is that you are only limited by your skills and your ambition. And like most enduring myths there is a thread of truth to it. Many successful people truly deserve what they have achieved.

But does anyone really possess $150 billion of personal merit? Can we statistically accept that the wealthiest nation in the world is also one of the most financially unequal without seeing a pattern of bias?

Perhaps the most selectively quoted book in history is Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, published, strangely enough, in 1776. Often credited with being the father of capitalism, Smith argued that markets free of excessive regulation would be more efficient than markets that were overly regulated, although Smith “made no categorical separation between the political and the economic, or state and market.”

Smith did, however, warn against the socially destructive power of monopolies, which unregulated markets will not protect against, and he correctly predicted that the excessive division of labor would lead to a degree of labor and wealth inequity that would destroy society.

At the time when US Steel, General Electric, and General Motors, among many others, were the power behind America’s global economic hegemony, most Americans earned a living through wages. And those wages were made possible by long term fixed investments that created jobs.

They were generally big bets that took a long time to earn a return but that aligned with the jobs-first priorities of most companies. (Employees first, communities second, shareholders a distant third.) And while not every employee enjoyed the same salary, the differences between the top earners and the average earners was a fraction of what it is today.

That era, of course, is long over. The current economy is geared toward the creation of wealth through the short-term investment in assets that will appreciate rapidly and are highly liquid. At the moment that is the stock market and synthetic financial tools pedaled by hedge funds, banks, and the like.

The problem is that the wage market encompassed much of America. The asset appreciation market encompasses only a tiny sliver of the richest among us. There is spillover, of course. The lawyers, analysts, consultants, bankers, and sales people who serve the asset appreciation market are doing quite well. But the man or woman who has less education and who might have made a decent living in a steel mill or car assembly plant, has lost out. And despite what the politicians will tell you, the gap is getting wider.

(I spent a career in corporate industry, have a college degree in economics, have been a CEO, and have served on four public company boards. I know enough to know that Levy knows what he’s talking about.)

The second important point to come out of all this is that economics is not really a “science” as most people think of that term. There is a shared jargon and there are commonly accepted principles. The very idea that there is an economy that is distinct from all other aspects of human existence, including the state, however, is a relatively recent concept.

The weakness of the distinction, in fact, is clearly demonstrated by the remarkable reality of just how diverse the history of the American economy is. The sun doesn’t always rise in the east in the world of economics. In each of the economic eras Levy describes it is stunning how few people actually formulated the thinking that defined them.

I will join some of the other reviewers in suggesting that the author could have spent more time explaining some of the jargon inevitably found in a treatise on economics. The layman obviously wasn’t his target audience but the book, I believe, could have read more smoothly and been much, much shorter. (The editor and publisher have to take some of the blame for this.)

Even if you have to slog your way through the more tedious sections on global capital flows and such, however, you’ll get something from the book even if you’ve never set foot in an economics classroom. If you get no more than the fact that the free market is a myth and that most long term capital that actually creates jobs and income for the average American is actually provided by you, the taxpayer, not the Wall Street capitalist, you will better understand why there is so much division in our country right now.

We don’t have a democratic economy. The young wonders of Silicon Valley would have nothing if it wasn’t for your tax dollars and your pension plan, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.

We can do better. We have to. The economic inequity we have now is simply not sustainable.

[Kumail Akbar · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I wrote the review for William Dalrymple’s Anarchy, I wrote something along the lines of ‘In order to do justice … the author should either be well versed in economic or financial history, or if not, defer to subject matter experts in order to identify the relevant metrics to gauge (an economy/economic unit’s) 'rise'. I now wish to take back my words, for it is simply not enough for a historian to selectively collect data points as well as metrics and terms which demonstrate the pretense of financial or economic understanding, whilst the author conveniently goes about crafting a narrative to sell his socio political world view to readers who have lowered their guard.

This is the single most important lesson I have taken from this book, which, amongst all the quasi-economic histories that I have read to date, at least shows that the author has tried to do their homework, and at least somewhat understands some economic and financial concepts – as opposed to let’s say the authors of the ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ or ‘A brief history of Neoliberalism’.

For me, personally, a solid economic history ought to be able to do justice to both the terms, not just one. And to do justice to the ‘economic’ part, the author ought to be able to navigate data and quantitative comparisons, especially where they make bold assertions regarding verifiable facts. Absence of the same should ring alarm bells, absence of any semblance of enumeration should lead the book to be classified as purely history, not economic history. Unfortunately, Levy, fails repeatedly on this account.

I should have been forewarned, when the author begins the introductory chapter claiming that ‘capital is a process’ – an argument that reeks of sophistry just like the other academic buzzword counterpart ‘commodification’. There is nothing much being said other than pretending that a set of inputs (aside from labor) are more abstract than otherwise assumed. Here are his actual words ‘Capital is legal property assigned a pecuniary value in expectation of a likely future pecuniary income… a capitalized form of property, including but not limited to a material factor of production, is a capital asset. Its legal owner is a capitalist. An economy in which capitalization has risen to principal economic status may be said to be a capitalist economy” a lot of words, precious little meaning. His definition renders the need to identify capitalist economies moot – because an economy running on expectations of future value will be capitalist? Sorry but which empire, state, economy or society has ever run only thinking about the past and not the present and (at least immediate) future?

This book is provides the necessary word salads if you wish to tell a consistent narrative of how American politics (and especially conservative ideas) connect from racialized slavery of the 17-1800s to the anti-union politics of the late gilded age to 80s 90s phenomena of seeing poverty as an individual’s fault – it all somehow boils down to “the process through which a legal asset is invested with pecuniary value, in light of its capacity to yield a future pecuniary profit”. Don’t bother asking for counterfactuals or evaluating alternative arguments and demonstrating them to be untrue or inaccurate, just flow the narrative and be impressed by the assortment of facts presented, which arguably, is the only good thing about this wordy, rambling tome.

This becomes even more apparent when Levy begins talking about the present economic era, defining the time period from the 1980s to the present day as an ‘Age of Chaos’. Chaos to him is reflected by the claim that ‘investors’ demand for liquidity (during this period) has become speculative and short term focused. However, this too is not backed by any evaluation of investments in long term or short-term securities, between bonds and real estate, between venture capital with its longer-term horizons and alternatives. The author is happy to throw around financial terms, but an actual analysis seems to be beyond him. In fact, I daresay, I believe the reason why he spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on the likes of LTCM, Enron, Lehman Brothers etc. instead of a dispassionate quantitative analysis is that these events have been made popular in recent books and shows, and can vividly confirm his argument, whereas a thorough evaluation of the two major tech booms (in the 90s and the 2010s), of which at least one has resulted in lasting change (it is the reason why I am writing this review using Microsoft word and going to publish on a social media website).

Worse still, wherever Levy falls short of giving a solid quantitative analysis, he fills up pages with random factoids, such as the cultural moorings of different eras, the preferences in art, all written in to amplify his arbitrary classification of different eras of American capitalism (Commerce, Capital, Control and Chaos). The tactic works well as it suggests a level of cultural awareness necessary to a work of history, but one that does little to make up for the serious shortfalls of an ‘economic’ history.

Unfortunately, given the dearth of accessible and well-known economic histories, especially those not written to pander to a left liberal crowd means that works such as these are likely to be seen as solid works of economic history, when they do not remotely come close to being one. For a truly solid economic history that does justice to not just the subject but is also a pleasure to read, readers can look to William Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange, or Adam Tooze’s Crashed or earlier works.

Rating 2 of 5 for pretending to be an economic history but adding a star for the quality of narrative writing and the excess of cultural data points and also for at least putting in the effort for learning some basic financial metrics before writing an economic history.

[Jeanine · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have rid myself of my albatross

[Zachary]

Good economic history of US. Very similar to Lind's Land of Promise, maybe slight edge just bc it extends through covid.

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better than Greenspan's work. Good connection of overaching themes between economy and culture, an area most economists and historians miss. Adds a layer of understanding for what makes America unique, and it's not all good.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely do I have an eBook with as many highlights and saved passages as this one – it’s simply one of those few books that you really wish most people would read. It’s so satisfying and really does cover the entire breadth of American economic history. Authored by a University of Chicago professor the expectation was that this would be more fawning of the major economic developments, but as Tyler Cowan noted this is ‘mostly an economic history from a left-mercantilist, nation-building point of view’. I can’t entirely disagree and would expect no less a description from a George Mason type, and certainly the Univ. of Chicago is no longer stuck in 1973, but I was so impressed that on the very accurate and seemingly unbiased description of the way that the US economy developed and progressed over the past 200 years. The last section, The Age of Chaos, was an apt title, expertly delivered and explained by Levy. Needless to say, this was one of my favorite books this year and one that I look forward to revisiting and referring to in the future.

[Brier Stucky · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful tour through the history of American capitalism, economic policy, and culture as it relates to the economy. One of the first things I noticed, in contrast to what some other reviewers have written is the scope of the book. The main focus of the book is indeed the transformation of American capitalism through four distinct periods, but along the way, Levy weaves in political history, biographies, and cultural history in a way that is seamless and shows the integration between all of these spheres. For example, to better understand economic inequality in the Gilded Age, Levy includes an entire chapter on populism as a social and political movement, discussing it's purpose and origins. Later in the book, Levy details the rise of Houston as the prototypical post-industrial city as a way to explain the changes wrought by the "new capitalism", a term Levy uses to refer to post-1980s American capitalism.

While all of the other aspects of the book flesh out the story and emphasize the significance of economic shifts, the story of the transformation of American capitalism is the star of the book, and Levy's command of this history is quite remarkable. In the introduction, Levy provides the reader with a map by which one can better understand this history, centering on a unusual definition of capital and the Keynesian concept of "liquidity preference". First, Levy explains capital not as a physical asset or factor of production , but rather as a process. For Levy, capital is about how theses assets are utilized, not the assets in themselves. Using this definition, Levy can more readily explain rapid economic downturns and shifts away from certain industries into others. Even more interesting and helpful to me was the concept of liquidity preference, which holds that people, when they become anxious about the future of pecuniary gain, will divest and seek to hoard money in liquid assets. This concept stands in contrast with the typical economic assumption that people are rational and will continue to invest as it is in their best long-term interests. In chapter after chapter, in event after event, Levy details just how irrational economic actors can be and how many of the America's economic crises can be explained by a rapid shift away from investment and toward liquidity.

There is so much more that one could say about this book. I think that anyone even slightly interested in the history of American capitalism can find something of interest here. In only a few sections did I find myself a bit confused as to the economic process that Levy was describing, but all in all, the book is very accessible no matter one's level of economic knowledge. If you are interested in understanding how we got to where we are today, as a country, as an economic system, and as a consumerist culture, I would highly recommend checking this one out.

[Rebecca Brenner Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

opens with claim that all American capitalism stems from the project of empire. specifically a seventeenth-century British empire crafted by “imperial statesmen, pious Christians, aristocratic lords, and gentlemen capitalists.” Levy writes: “English colonizers, with their prayer books, farm animals, and sea-worn nerves, brought the habit of capitalist commerce to North America in the seventeenth century.” for readers interested in Alexander Hamilton and/or the musical, chapter three situates Hamilton’s financial system in this narrative. chapter five reminds me of Levy’s first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, which offers a history of the idea of risk, because Ages of American Capitalism’s chapter five, “Confidence Men” reintroduces a human element to high political-economic theory by unpacking the “moral sense” that men like Henry David Thoreau and P. T. Barnum sought within American capitalism. this 945-page monster traces capitalism in the United States, capitalism’s relationships with policy and morality, and how all of the above stems from an imperial drive

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expansive and excellent.

Covering hundreds of years, this is a full-fledged study of political economy: looking at how the power arrangements in America have created capital, markets, and the other economic currents driving life. A tad idiosyncratic at moments but always interesting and insightful.

I would lump it in with Beckert’s Empire of Cotton in terms of the ideological lens: not Marxist, but definitely Marx-ish in terms of deconstructing how capitalism was physically and ideologically built.

Big book, though, in size and scope. Took me about three months to read—albeit with plenty of delays on my side from travel, the kid, and COVID.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding!!!!!!!

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunningly ambitious. And very, very good! A fascinating history of the US through the lens of the economy.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the US, and specifically of American capitalism. Unlike the US, capitalism is hard to define and hard to find an exact point of origin for. Private ownership of some type of capitalised asset (a sheep, a chicken, an orchard) goes pretty far back, but Karl Polanyi argued that a capitalist system was defined by "generalised markets" for land, labour and money, something which fully evolved only after the founding of the republic.

Levy begins his history with the Restoration, which bolstered the mostly failing colonial project in the new world. The original settlers had been Puritans uninterested in commerce, but under the guidance of the Earl of Shaftesbury (the first, not the famous philosopher who was his grandson), Britain moved to seeing the new territory as a source of wealth, which could be optimally extracted, as part of a global empire.

It is difficult to appreciate what a fantastical project the quest for an Atlantic empire was at the time when Shaftesbury and other gentleman imperial capitalists embarked on it. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before. Convention offered only so much guidance. Shaftesbury may have been better informed about America than any man in England, but a thick fog of uncertainty remained.

The guiding spirit here was mercantilism: free trade within the empire, and positive trade balances toward everyone else. For the earl, the best way to achieve this was in the twinning of private wealth and public policy (something which he practised in his vast holdings of sugar plantations in the Caribbean*). In the early days of the republic this was the approach suggested by Alexander Hamilton, who set up the first Bank of the United States in 1791, opposition to which led to the founding of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, who killed the bank's first iteration (a Second Bank of the United States popped up after the War of 1812 with its associated costs). At the heart of the issue was a debate over the financialisation of the country, and the creation of economic structures that would increase public wealth but simultaneously enrich connected elites while leaving behind the independent yeoman farmers in whom the country still saw its ideal.

In general, Levy loves citing examples from art, music, architecture, and literature to describe the national mood at different points, and the end of the first period of the book (the "Age of Commerce", ending in 1860) contains a survey of writers who were critical of (or proud of) the new national mood of materialism, industry and wealth generation. Seeing the roots of this idea in Rousseau, he focuses on Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, and in contrast on PT Barnum, whose autobiography argued in favour of the new commercialist spirit.

Part 2 begins with the Civil War. Levy quotes the historians Charles and Mary Beard (arguably his guiding spirits) that the "complete destruction" of slave property without any compensation was surely "the most stupendous act of sequestration in the history of Anglo-Saxon Jurisprudence." Much has been said about the connection between slavery and capitalism: although the practice is obviously ancient, it had died out in Europe and was consciously revived by those in the "triangular trade". In the south defence of slavery often included an appeal to a different culture from Northern commercialism, where paternalistic slave-owners provided some basic obligations for their slaves and gave them a stable way of life, in place of exposing them to pure market capitalism.

After the Civil War, capitalist expansion accelerated during the Gilded Age, when techniques improvements seemed endless and American industry and economic extraction rippled across the plains (exemplified in the meteoric growth of Chicago).

The new industrial energy regime always carried the potential for natural resource constraints, but they would hit in the 1970s, not in the 1870s. During the Age of Capital, when the industrial revolution swept across North America, diminishing returns were nowhere near in sight. Whether it was labor-saving machinery in manufacturing or land-saving techniques in the fields, productivity increased everywhere.

(There is an amusing anecdote about Herbert Spencer whose pop-Darwinist ideas about life as the "survival of the fittest" were the guiding ideology to figures like Andrew Carnegie. He was brought out to the States by his admirers, but while visiting Carnegie's steelworks he observed, "Six months’ stay here would justify suicide", and dedicated his talk at a parting dinner at Delmonico’s to a "criticism of American life as characterized by over-devotion to work" to a stunned audience.)

Henry Ford was another apostle of better living through hard work and automation, described in his My Life and Work. Gramsci, in prison in 1934, wrote of Ford's "biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man". At the same time there was a rise in labour unrest, public anger at "robber barons", and conflict between farmers and Eastern elites over monetary policy. (William Jennings Bryan delivered his famous "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold" in 1896.)

Another notable aspect of this period is the rise of J.P. Morgan, a private citizen, as lender to governments who effectively dictated their fiscal policies (I wrote a bit more about this reviewing Ron Chernow's biography.) The period ends in the great crash of 1929. Galbraith's well known book (my review here) settled on the now-conventional wisdom that stocks were wildly overpriced, but others have more recently disagreed.

Levy periodises what follows as the "Age of Control" - the growth of government management of the economy beginning in the New Deal and (although somewhat attenuated in the post-WWII fear of communism) only waning with the election of Ronald Reagan, who ushered in today's neoliberal consensus (covered in part 4 - the "Age of Chaos"). Government banking regulation (Reg Q, Glass-Steagall, federal deposit insurance) limited the profits of banks while guaranteeing their viability. The 1930s saw experiments with government control of pricing and labour negotiation in an attempt to spur "reflation" - the problem being, as Keynes saw, a spiral of fear keeping economic activity seized up, or as FDR might say, "fear itself", while idle production capacity went to waste. In the postwar world American prosperity soared and seemed unstoppable, and the various progressive experiments of the New Deal were wound down.

The 70s saw the breakdown of the postwar paradigm in a wave of stagflation. The old certainties of the Phillips curve and Keynesian stimulus didn't seem to help against the decade's issues: surging oil prices, urban decay, global competition. In response came a new theory: monetarism. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" Milton Friedman, its leading exponent, famously said. (The stubbornly low growth of the last decade in spite of waves of QE and near-zero repo rates seemed to test this theory, but recent inflation has shown that on a long enough timeline, the theory might still work.) (Also, I wrote more about Friedman here.) Fossil fuels brought opportunity as well as problems, as the 1970s saw the explosive, unrestrained growth of Houston around the oil and gas industry.

The "Volcker shock" (associated with Reagan, although he was a Carter appointee) stunned the markets but succeeded in taming inflation. The Reagan era also saw a sharp growth in the financial sector and the "financialisation" of the real economy: this was the decade of Gordon "greed is good" Gekko. Another major change was in the ethos of "shareholder value". The CEO of U.S. Steel, announcing a wave of downsizing, said that the company was not in the business of making steel but "in the business of making profits" (a path later followed by another great US industrial name, General Electric). So-called "corporate raiders" (activists or PE firms) would take over a company and optimise it for return, which sometimes meant, for example, closing down a profitable plant if it wasn't profitable enough. And somewhat ironically, this was partly driven by the need for returns for large public pension funds. Benefits intended to help one group of workers ended up driving another out of work. Levy argues that another key change in this period was the transition from "historical cost" accounting to "mark-to-market", which attempts to value an asset as the net present value of its future income stream, an innovation which gradually spread from the financial sector to the nuts-and-bolts economy. (This fits neatly with a definition at the beginning of the book of "capital": an asset for which the sum of expected future cash flows exceeds the current price.)

Levy's critique of accounting standards is a good way to segue into what I think is the biggest weakness in the book. Although there are stray factual errors (e.g. claiming that Facebook was founded in the 1990s), the bigger blind spots are simply the things that, while important, do not interest the author. He dismisses altogether the field of Operations Research - applying mathematical optimisation to decision-making - as "mind-numbing", and more generally (echoing a common critique) argues that contemporary economists fetishise mathematical rigour at the expense of understanding social and psychological market forces. Sure, one can infer something about society's mood, as Levy does, from Kanye West lyrics and the film MAGIC MIKE (2012), but one wonders how different the book would have been if the author had teamed up with a more quantitative historian willing to dig more deeply into economic models and accounting standards.

Still, this book does an impressive job of tying a long period into a coherent story, covering America's growth into a superpower and the intervening crises. Economic forces shaped America's development and later the world's, and created the consumerist wonderland of today, and its associated problems. One key takeaway is the Keynesian idea that people have a natural tendency to hoard, and some kind of collective action is necessary in order to keep the markets flowing. Another is that there is usually a clash between government power and the interests of capitalists, and it is necessary to find a balance. Too much of one and you lose dynamism and growth; too much of the other, and the economy ends up captured by a tiny cadre of well-connected stewards of capital.

*Levy includes a few details about the absolutely hideous, soul-crushing misery of these plantations, but I will spare you.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

TL;DR

Ages of American Capitalism takes readers on a tour of U.S. economic history. From the colonial period to Reconstruction to World War II to the stagflation of the 70s, Jonathan Levy analyzes all of these eras through the lens of a changing capitalism. Highly recommended to history and economics buffs.

Disclaimer: The publisher provided an eARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are mine and mine alone.

For this and more reviews, please, visit my blog.

Review: Ages of American Capitalism by Jonathan Levy

One of my idiosyncracies is that I’m interested in reading about everything. I love learning about history, and I love learning about economics. For a while, I considered going back to school to get a Ph.D. in either or both subjects. (In addition to the literature, French, and philosophy Ph.D.’s that I’d like.) But life moved on, and I didn’t make the career switch. Still history and economic books have a particular ability to lure me into waters that are over my head. I have Piketty’s Capital sitting on my shelf, started, set aside, restarted, re-set aside. The reason that I love these books is because I’m looking for how the world got to the point it’s at. For example, how did conservatives come to worship at the altar of capitalism? I believe that the study of history can tell us a lot about today. If you agree, then let me recommend Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism. This book covers the economic history of the U.S. from the colonial era right up to the Great Recession of 2008. This book challenged my previous studies while remaining accessible to be read for fun. Levy’s balanced analysis looks at how capitalism evolved with the changing American times.

Ages of American Capitalism covers a lot of ground; Levy starts with colonial policies and ends with the Great Recession of 2008. In the afterword, he tells us a little of his thoughts on the nation of the 2020s. Starting in the Age of Commerce, Levy shows us how English polices shaped the colonies and their world. While he is objective, he doesn’t gloss over the horrors of that era. Levy discusses how colonials used John Locke’s philosophy as justification to steal land from natives. But the point of these early chapters is to show how capitalism emerged from British mercantilism in the U.S. Levy returns again and again to the work of Adam Smith to show “Smithian gains.” This age was brought to an end by the “political destruction of enslaved capital,” i.e. the end of the Civil War. This led to the Age of Capital, an emergence of industry. The government encouraged private industrial development, whether through railroad subsidies or protection tariffs. This age would be see a rise in productivity and a speculative boom-and-bust credit cycle. It also saw the rise of populism and nearly toppled the gold standard. Sadly, this age also saw the passing of the last significant third political party, the People’s Party. Detroit shows its glory days here as the book covers the rise of mass manufacturing. But this age ends with the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushers in the Age of Control, where government comes to the rescue. The boom and bust cycle got stuck in a bust for longer than expected. Everyone, from investors to your uncle Bob, chose a perceived safety of possession as opposed to the long term benefits of investment. The New Deal sought to control the economy by reducing the volatility of capitalism and finding employment for men. But World War II came along to eliminate U.S. unemployment through massive government spending. Private contractors got rich off the government’s money then and still do, now. Consumerism roared through the country, achieving a golden age. But no golden age lasts. Profits dropped; wages stagnated; and Nixon took the nation off the gold standard right as OPEC initiated its embargo. The Age of Control ended in an inflationary crisis as capital morphed again. Finally, the Age of Chaos descends. Paul Volcker decides to raise interest rates, creating a shock that catapulted the Fed to the top of economic policy making. In the Age of Chaos, capital evolved into the short term asset appreciation focused thing we all know and love. Clinton’s New Economy leads to the Great Moderation which leads to the Great Recession. Tasked with fixing the great recession, the Obama administration returned capital to an economic continuity, except, as we now know, the return to a booming economy left many people out. This created a chaos that allowed a candidate like Trump to be elected, though he never delivered any help to those left out by Obama’s economy. Will Biden’s administration enact policies to end the Age of Chaos? Or are we stuck in a new cycle of small booms and mega-busts?

Jonathan Levy decided to portion his book into four different eras of U.S. economy while sticking to his central study on capital and capitalism. The Age of Commerce, the Age of Capital, the Age of Control, and the Age of Chaos are titles for a truly epic fantasy, and this economic history is truly epic. It weighs in at close to a 1,000 pages with notes. Frankly, Levy could have broken this up into four books titled to their corresponding age, but the overall thesis would have been lost, I think.

I think this is a very even handed yet detailed examination of the economic history of the U.S. I identified a number of things which I could debate with friends on either side of the political spectrum. Though I have no doubt that both sides of the political spectrum will claim this book leans to far in the other direction, I think it’s a fairly centrist book. Levy excels at letting the reader come to the same conclusions as him; he doesn’t beat us over the head with his opinion.

Huge Book

Ages of American Capitalism is a huge book, not just in terms of size but in terms of scope and in terms of ideas. Throughout the book, the reader is shown that capitalism has never been just one thing in the U.S. It has evolved and changed over time, responding to changes in society, politics, and the crisis of the day. Capitalism adapts as needed, but from this book, it seems as if each adaptation shortens the view of capitalism. I think. The reality is that I’ll need to read this book again to understand it better. Part of me wants to buy in paper form so that I can write marginalia to ensure Levy’s lessons stick in my head, but I prefer the electronic version for highlighting. There is so much to learn in this book that a single read through isn’t enough.

Prior to each section, Levy put a short introduction to the chapters that will cover the next age. These introductions are good summaries, and I recommend reading them before and after the section. Before will prepare you for what’s coming; after will help you remember what you read.

The Populists

Ever since reading Thomas Frank’s The People, No, I’ve been fascinated by the populist movement of the late 1800’s. Levy includes a chapter on them, and I loved it. Levy describes the lessons we should draw from this failed party. Though it didn’t gain the White House and inevitably collapsed, it affected the politics of the time in lasting ways. Leaving the gold standard, being anti-monopoly, being wary of corporate power, and favorable laws for incorporating trade unions are all legacies of the populist movement.

Levy does an excellent job analyzing the party with both the good and the bad of populism. It is anti-inequality yet is attractive to racists. The Populists were a varied group, and Levy captures the various dichotomies that populism entails.

Notes

One thing to note, Dr. Levy includes references to papers he’s written and published elsewhere. I didn’t check out those papers to see what other references are there. I think this matters if one were to use part of the book to debate. I like to base my arguments off more than one authority because otherwise I’m committing the appeal to authority error. Again, I don’t see anything wrong with this practice of citing your own work; I just didn’t read the papers to see how they influenced this book. If you did, please, let me know in the comments if reading the papers adds to this reading experience.

Conclusion

Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism is a big book full of huge ideas written to be accessible to professionals and hobbyists like me. Levy succeeded in showing how capitalism changed and evolved as American society needed it to. Ages of American Capitalism connects the dots from the early days of U.S. colonies to the Great Recession of 2008 in elegant yet thoughtful ways.

Ages of American Capitalism by Jonathan Levy is available from Random House on April 20th, 2021.

8 out of 10!

[Jeffrey Bostick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A history of the United States from colonial times up until the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Much in the way Taylor Swift divides her career into eras, Levy breaks the American economy up into “ages.” There is an Age of Commerce (1660 until 1860), an Age of Capital (1860 to 1932) an Age of Control (1932 to 1980) and the Age of Chaos which we, presumably, are experiencing now.

After acknowledging the elusiveness of a proper definition of capital, Levy settles on this phrase: “The process through which a legal asset is invested with pecuniary value, in light of its capacity to yield a future pecuniary profit.” The political push and pull over the nature and direction of those investments; the tension between short term hoarding and long term redistribution is central to his narrative.

Obviously, this is a story told on a big sprawling scale. But it’s one well worth diving into for students of US history. One doesn’t need a whole lot of background in economics to access it. Rather than get too far into the discussion, here are a few items I added to my notes as I read.

1) Levy’s commentary on Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man” illustrates that a "booming" market in short term speculation is fundamentally the same thing as a stagnant economy.

Melville’s novel parses three contradictory desires and emotional states. His analysis was correct: the capitalist credit cycle of boom and bust, only just emerging in his day, is motivated by a contradictory drive of speculative investment. The contradiction consists in the fact that while credit-fueled and energetic speculation can lead to genuine capitalist investment booms, instigating wealth-generating enterprise, individuals can also succumb to the temptations of short-term speculation alone, in which, benefiting from the transactional liquidity of capital markets, they simply move their bets in and out of assets, confidently seeking short term gain. But speculations may not fix on objects of investment long enough for long-term economic development to happen. Capital just spins its top. And the speculative desire to leave all potential investment options open is only a fantasy. For if all options are kept open, but never exercised nothing actually ever happens.

2) Nostalgia is also a symptom of stagnation.

Capitalism demands an orientation of economic life toward the future, and so the constant urge to look back, and nostalgically stamp past ages “golden” is probably some kind of psychic compensation for the unremttingness of that demand, especially in moments when, to many, it feels difficult to muster a positive vision about the future.

3) By the time of the 1970s neoliberal turn, any capacity for a coherent collective economic policy was hamstrung by a politics of alienation, fractionalization and “individual practitioners of narcissism.”

The federal government simply did not have the mechanisms at hand to master inflation. There was no notion of a unified public interest on the basis of which to act anyway. Instead the polity was splintering into Nixon’s Silent Majority, black nationalists, “back to the land” farmers, white ethnic revivalists (including neo-Confederates), Friends of the Earth, pro-live evangelical “family values” Christians, radial lesbians, international bankers, advocates of Indian sovereignties, Business Roundtable CEOs, black women activists of the National Welfare Rights Organization, white nationalist Vietnam veterans, and last but not least, individual practitioners of narcissism.

4) Finally, this book (along with Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto later on) drove home for me the huge impact Herbert Hoover has had on the American political economy of the 20th Century and beyond. Ideologically, Hoover was the equivalent of today's centrist Democrats. He believed the nation's business leaders should contribute to progress. But he wanted that to happen through public-private partnership or at his polite request.

On the telephone and at two White House conferences, the president personally pleaded with the corporate executives of the largest, most regulated industries to increase capital investment expenditures. In 1930 railroads and utilities obliged. Yet everywhere else, especially in residential construction, fixed investment kept falling. Hoover recognized that during the 1920s, corporate profits had run ahead of wages, and he believed that high wages would stabilize spending, a good thing. “The first shock,” he declared, “must fall on profits and not wages.” Whether because of Hoover’s promptings or not, the nation’s largest employers agreed not to slash wages, even as they continued to fire their less desirable employees, a pattern that would persist. Proudly, Hoover said the agreements were, “not a dictation or interference by the government with business.” Rather they were the result of “a request from the government that you co-operate in prudent measure to solve a national problem.” The president boasted, “This is a far cry from the arbitrary and dog-eat-dog attitude of the business world of some thirty for forty years ago.” Hoover believed his “associational state” transcended the Jacksonian sphering of public and private, state, and market, which under the banner of equal commercial opportunity, had withered state action throughout the Age of Capital. But he drew one line in the sand. He would not coerce capitalists to invest.

This is famously the path to failure. And yet it has persisted as canon for respectable politicians and pundits far and wide. Case in point, here is Joe Biden in 2021 taking the Hoover approach with insurers and utility companies after Hurricane Ida.

“I’m calling on the insurance companies at this critical moment. Don’t hide behind the fine print and technicality. Do your job. Keep your commitment to your communities you insure,” he continued. “Do the right thing. Pay your policy holders what you owe them to cover the cost of temporary housing in the midst of a natural disaster. Help those in need. That’s what all of us need to do.”

Biden also expressed that, throughout the week, he’d expressed that same message to local officials and utility and energy company representatives during virtual meetings.

How has that approach worked out?

A Louisiana State University survey last year found that 17% of Louisiana homeowners reported their provider canceled their policy. Sixty-three percent of policyholders said the cost of their insurance coverage increased from the prior year, the survey found.

There was roughly a 10% to 12% increase in homeowners’ insurance costs last year in the United States, said Mark Friedlander, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, a nonprofit industry association.

You can't just ask these people to be nice. You have to force them. These “commitments to community” Biden imagines exist in corporate America are more tenuous than ever, if they even existed at all. And today’s political leaders,having abandoned the lessons of the New Deal, are less equipped to deal with that reality as a result.

[Kurt Pankau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lot of book. Levy lays out academically an overarching history of the American economy framed through the progression of capital and how it has changed over the various historical eras, starting with colonization and the acquisition of land right up through the start of the COVID-19 slump. Levy's main thesis is that capitalist economies are organized around capital and that you can derive a lot of understanding of economics by looking at how capital is shaped and how owners of capital attempt to extract pecuniary returns from the capital that they own and how that is tied to investment and economic expansion.

To give an example, in the pre-Civil War era, slaves represented a form of capital, and their emancipation was a huge shock to the South--not because of the loss of labor, but because a huge share of southern capital evaporated. Suddenly the only capital in the South was land, and that lack of investment property hindered the Southern economy. Levy doesn't sugar-coat or try to justify the horrors of slavery; he's simply explaining the economic ramifications of emancipation in terms that no one at the time would have been able to foresee. Levy, in fact, frequently circles back to how attitudes about race and gender have been entrenched in politics--indeed, much of the Southern agenda from the Civil War through to the modern age has been centered around white supremacy--and how that entrenchment legitimately hurts the economy.

Another theme of Levy's is the idea of confidence. Commercial economics at scale necessarily means doing business with people you don't know, so how can you have confidence in people to transact fairly with you? The ideas of consumer confidence and confidence men (e.g., "con men") run in parallel, as institutions work to build trust while individuals work to erode it. A lot of ink is devoted to Herman Melville's book "The Confidence-Men" and P.T. Barnum's hoaxes, which are only tangentially related to economics, but form instructive examples.

It gave me a lot to chew on, intellectually, and there were some fascinating nuggets that I hadn't heard before--and I listen to an awful lot of economics podcasts! I didn't know, for example, that Thomas Jefferson's policies involved allowing more people to own smaller plots of land because doing so meant more people were eligible to vote that would support his party and agenda. Or the details of how Paul Volcker nearly single-handedly crushed the inflation boom of the 70s.

This is intended for a general audience, but some background with economic ideas will make the reading go more smoothly. It's very dry. Even the rare bits of humor are dry. (I'll confess that I chortled mightily at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it joke about mark-to-market accounting being described as the great literary fiction of the 00's.) It's not going to be for everyone, clearly, but if the idea of it seems interesting to you, check it out. It's an extremely well-executed version of itself.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Ages” may be long at ~750 pages, but given it covers the Colonial period through the Great Recession, it’s relatively efficient. In that regard, this book should be treated more as a foundational text rather than “the one book” about American capitalism you’d ever need to read. Big History tomes, for all their richness, can still just scratch the surface, lest they veer into 1,000+ page territory. My recommendation is to use “Ages” as a departure point for your further explorations of America’s economic-historical identity.

If you’re looking for a scathing left-wing critique of capitalism, this book doesn’t provide it. Nor does it offer a passionate neoliberal defense of capitalism. It presents what feels like a pretty centrist accounting of capitalism’s shortcomings and accomplishments, though on the balance it finds plenty to criticize in the American economic system. Some people will appreciate that, others won’t. Overall, the author’s main goal seems to be to identify key trends and distinctions in America’s particular brand of capitalism, rather than render a final judgment of it. Some of these trends are better described as shifts between contrasts over America’s 400+ yr history as a colonial-then-sovereign state: public vs private property and power, upswings vs downswings in credit cycles, fixed investment vs liquidity preference, productivity- vs finance-driven economic expansions, restrictive vs looser monetary policy, Keynesianism vs Monetarism, labor vs capital, growth across space vs growth across time, etc.

Though the author certainly delves into the intersection between American economics and American sociology (systemic racism, classism, labor rights, feminism, individualism, etc), these social phenomena do not anchor the book so much as they embellish it. Major events, like the Vietnam War, feel more like footnotes in Levy’s economically-centered tale. Some might appreciate this focused approach while others might feel it misses the larger narrative.

The outcome of this book is not so much a verdict on whether American capitalism is good or bad in total, but more of a consummate, complex definition of just what American capitalism is.

[Angel Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long, yet entertaining and informative read, even if some of the more financial/technical ideas required I reread them multiple times but now I understand a lot more finance jargon thanks to this book, especially as it pertains to the various financial crises during what the author dubs the "Age of Chaos" (1980s - present)! Our current era, the Age of Chaos, is defined by economic growth through asset price appreciation/inflation. Seems like the US economy is fond of SOME forms of inflation. This asset price appreciation means that asset owners (who are becoming an increasingly small group within the USA) are the ones seeing the gains from the economic expansion of the "Age of Chaos" as opposed to labor income. I'm glad the author recognized that the development of the IT/Tech sector during this period in US history mirrors the uncontrolled and undirected growth of railroads during the Age of Capital (end of civil war to the Great Depression). One gripe I do have with the book is with its presentation of US imperial action as bumbling/accidental (most obvious when the author discusses the 'failures' of the Iraq War).

In discussing the 2008 Financial/Liquidity Crisis, Levy points to the lack of answers the Left presented in response to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Nothing is said about the impact of the dissolution of the USSR on the imagination of left wingers in the USA.

Also really enjoyed reading the sections of this book that detailed the rise and increasing importance of marketing firms to the US economy beginning in the 1950s-1960s.

Good book to see the general trends/patterns in the development of the US economy and how the power to control investment at the hands of capitalists determines the direction our economy (what gets exchanged, what gets produced, what gets consumed) takes.

[Kailuo Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States covers an ambitious scope, which makes its final section somewhat disappointing. The author dubs 1979-2020 as the "Age of Chao," characterized by an asset-driven economy fueled by liquidity, which the Federal Reserve sustains during times of stress. This broad characterization may be too opinionated for some readers, myself included.

The book initially focuses on the broad economic logic of the first two ages of American capitalism: the Age of Commerce and the Age of Capital. However, from the Age of Control onward, the focus gradually narrows to the singular issue of who controls fixed investment decisions. Considerable attention is given to financial markets and monetary policy, yet an analysis of how economic structure itself has shifted over the last 40 years—particularly the transition from a manufacturing economy to service economy coupled with the IT revolution—is absent.

The author seems to suggest that the future of our democratic society hinges on our ability to make the right fixed investments for benefit of the community. The existing solution is to make investments tradable with high liquidity and let the market works its magic. True, this enables speculation and occasionally necessitates Federal Reserve intervention to quell irrational panic, but the book doesn't provide any concrete alternative solutions, without which one might have little choice but to simply accept the exiting market based solution is the best at hand.

[Nate Horning · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m very conflicted on how I feel towards Ages of American Capitalism by Jonathan Levy. On the one hand, this is a very dense and dry book filled with jargon I was unfamiliar with and sections that nearly put me to sleep. On the other hand, this is an incredibly insightful, well-researched, and unbiased account of the American economy from colonization through to the Great Recession. Taken as a whole, the narrative and its four stages make for a cohesive retelling of the transformation of capital itself. There are many “Aha!” moments and revealing truths packed into this book if one is willing to take the time to wade through some fairly complicated material.

One of my major criticisms would be the lack of foundational definitions for terms that are used throughout the book. Some terms pop up frequently and it would be beneficial for the reader to understand how the author defines such words in the given economic context. Another criticism is that I wish it were a bit more brisk; I sometimes wanted the author to pick up the pace so that it felt more like a story as opposed to a textbook.

Overall, Ages of American Capitalism deserves much praise for the sheer depth and breadth of topics and eras covered. After I finished this book, I found it to be an unvarnished, professorial, sometimes boring, sometimes exciting account of events. And this is precisely why I know this author is an evenhanded and unbiased historian. Like the truth itself, this book isn’t sensational, misleading, or loud. Instead, it is a blunt assertion of facts for those wishing to understand our objective reality.

[James Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliantly descriptive book but one that I found lacking in analysis. Whenever I read a book like this from a promising young academic, I always feel they are pulling their punches. Given the vicious Darwinian world of American academia, you wonder to yourself, "who did they need to impress with this, and who were they afraid to offend?" The academic world is one of apprenticeship, networking, and endless subtle hierarchies of schools and departments within disciplines. You've got to be clever and erudite in order to stand out, and you need a fine pedigree of institution and advisors in order to thrive, but you also have to be bold but not too bold. There is nothing objective about the hiring or tenuring processes. People's subjective assessments play a huge role, along with who you are, where you come from, and if you are clubbable or not.

All that preamble so I can say that I, instinctively, think this would have been a better book if it were bolder and more incisive, if the author threw caution to the wind and named names. The extent to which each of these "ages" was a deliberate elite project is in there, but not teased out to the extent it needed to be. Capitalism is built on accumulation strategies, and each is dependent on extracting value from someone, be it Native Americans, slaves, industrial workers, or middle class homeowners. A greater emphasis on the winners and losers (and the fact that who was a winner and who a loser was pre-planned) in this process would have been welcome.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lengthy book where it's easy to get lost in the weeds, but there's some really good content in it. He divides up US economic history into four ages: the age of commerce (pre-Civil War), age of industry (pre-FDR), age of control (FDR until Reagan), and the age of chaos (last 40 years). He notes that the 2008 recession didn't really change the nature of the economy the way the Great Depression did. He also notes that FDR had decades of policies to pick from whereas there was very little like that in'09 when Obama took office. (To that end, I think the '08 Recession better repeats the Panic of 1893, which was huge, but didn't alter anything). Levy notes that state action always precedes a shift in the direction of the economy.

One issue: the book essentially ends in 2010. He has a brief epilogue, but it's a bit odd that an attempt at an all-encompasssing history doesn't decide to encompass the last decade. (Note: he was inspired to write this in part because existing histories of the US economy don't come anywhere near the present, so he's getting us closer, but not quite all the way).

There's a lot of good info here, but there's too much for me to process so soon after having completed it. I'll look over my notes over the next few days.

[Nathanael Mickelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a significant book, but not necessarily a great one. As a synthesis of modern trends in American historical scholarship, it is swimmingly proficient. However, American historical scholarship might also be considered at a low point and the prejudices of present scholarship are evident when Levy disagrees with historical actors, as he avoids engagement with genuine intellectual criticism and prefers the smug condescension and near ad hominems that, if expressed forcefully enough, is confused for enlightenment.

Additionally, the main economic outlook of the book is some paleo-Keynesianism which deifies Keynes while ignoring one of his more admirable traits, the ability to pivot when confronted with new information.

Moreover, pretentious vocabulary is substituted for synonymous terms which exist in present vernacular and convey the same ideas with more clarity, ie “scarcity value of money” where “purchasing power” is quite adequate.

Still, it is an admirable overview of American history and useful for understanding present currents in the history of capitalism and American history more broadly.

[Rick Goff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a work of history, not a critique or an indictment. The book makes no doctrinal or ideological arguments in its organization or exposition. There are themes, of course, the most prominent, to my mind, being the effect of the tendencies of capital either to speculate or to hoard, and the role of government in shaping economic outcomes, including productivity and economic inequality.

American economic history is divided into Ages of Commerce (Smithian expansion of markets and resource exploitation), Capital (the Civil War, industrialization and Fordism, and the Bull Market and Great Depression), Control (the New Deal and income politics), and Chaos (the Volcker Shock, deregulation, financialization, and the Great Recession).

I’ll bet Levy is a popular professor. He makes pretty technical information interesting and he connects the economy to individuals and culture. The manuscript contains more than a dozen typos in its 741 pages, the most cringeworthy being “morality” in place of “mortality.”

[Ian Karundeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. The author, Jonathan, has a great ability to map out the economic history of the United States in a clear, concise yet entertaining way. The structure of the book revolves around Jonathan's chronological division of the history of the United State's political economy into four distinct eras/ages, and how its beliefs, cultures, laws, and geopolitical events during these ages broadly shaped the the countries economy. The main insight the book seems to reiterate is the idea that capital is a social and arbitrary construct, and that who the owners/receivers/distributors/regulators of capital should be are contingent on the aforementioned factors of the particular age. Although some concepts might be difficult to grasp for those who are not learned on the language of finance, the overarching narratives and stories will not be lost on the layman. A potential downside for some may be that Jonathan's left leaning bias becomes more obvious towards the end.

[Daniele · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book over months which probably affects my review.

A biography of American capitalism from Colonial times to the Covid-19 Pandemic. While the analysis relating to the first two thirds of the book were not completely new to me, I appreciated the analysis from 1970s onward.

I thought Levy's last few chapters regarding the last 40 years of American capitalism were very interesting. In the last few pages he suggests we seem to have found a way to avoid horrible events (e.g. Great Depression) through policy (monetary and fiscal). While this is good, government seems to be unable to come up with new ideas to direct American capitalism to its new destination. Levy points to New Deal capitalism, war economy in WWII, railroads after the Civil War. There is something interesting there though I don't completely agree with him and neither does his book. 1870s-1929 were a great period of innovation in American capitalism with little role for government).