Shock Values

"How inflation fears shaped American society, then and now. For most of its history, the United States has benefited from price stability-a steady relationship between supply and demand, characterized by prices that don't inflate or deflate in unpredictable fashion. Across these long stretches, the US economy became famously free-market: prices did the job of stabilizing the economy so the government didn't have to. In this sweeping and revelatory history of American economy and democracy, Carola Conces Binder shows that American price-stability is no accident. From its colonial origins to today, the American state has been designed for, and continues to be shaped by, an unlimited effort to insulate the economy from the dangers of price fluctuations. Binder narrates an American history in which inflationary anxiety has informed everything from the reluctant establishment of paper money to the rise of the modern Federal Reserve as an omniscient actor in public policy. At every step, and with each historical brush with monetary instability, the US has been reinvented as a response to its most recent failings. Shock Values is the epochal history of the US as a monetary state. Binder recounts both the monetary interests at the dawn of the Republic; its decades-long experiments with price controls; the outsize role of agriculture and industry in its monetary apparatus; and how the rise of the all-powerful Federal Reserve was born out of crisis more than anything else. Expansive and erudite, Shock Values is a watershed telling of an old history: how American union's pledge to be more perfect was drawn along monetary lines. It is not to be missed"--

Carola Binder is associate professor of economics at Haverford College. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. She tweets at @cconces.