The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
By (Author) Bruce G. Carruthers
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
17th January 2023
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Economics
Finance and the finance industry
332.70973
Physical Properties
Hardback
408
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
Description
A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in Americaand how it continues to divide the haves from the have-nots
The Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower
The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differenceswhich are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for big data and algorithmic decision-making.
Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.
Author Bio
Bruce G. Carruthers is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton) and the coauthor of, among other books, Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach and Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis.
