The majority of the first European settlers in the US were indentured servants, a form of labor debt that one willingly sells oneself into. Additionally, the initial settlements were funded by capital and new forms of business organization such as the joint-stock company. Most people are pretty well-informed about Indentured servitude and the trading companies, so this entry focuses mainly on the conditions responsible for the populating of the Americas with people from the Old World. ...

This is a reposting of a contribution to the "How did India go from Being a Rich Country to a Poor Country" thread.

Two of the earliest policies in India were to establish monopolies in key industries such as salt, tobacco, and essential spices, as well as to discourage manufacturing.

The most significant early economic policy of the British was the salt tax. It is said that in hot regions salt is worth more than gold. It was a necessity of life, which is...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ostensibly is a fictional account of Joyce's early life in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century. But why go to the trouble of fictionalizing his life? Part of it is in recounting his past the fictionalizing gives him control over it, to define it the way he sees fit. Everything then becomes endowed with meaning. Even something as simple as his name, something given to him at birth, becomes...

To tackle my project of showing the origins of money manager capitalism, I've decided to described the evolution of four institutions in American economic history; debt, managerialism, the welfare state, and cultural fundamentalism. In this thread and in subsequent ones, I discuss debt.

Debt is often seen in moralistic terms and having become a problem fairly recently. It depicted as the result of bad apples rather than systemic forces, of greedy, impatient individuals spending...

Origins of Money Manager Capitalism
Introduction
On the eve of the financial crisis in 2008 inequality in the United States was at its highest levels since 1929. We see this in a variety of measures. In 1980 the average CEO made 40 times the average worker. By 2004, that number had accelerated to over 500 times. Several studies have shown that virtually all of the income growth over the last thirty years has gone to a narrow percentage of the population.
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