The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Cook, Eli. 2013. The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11169762 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life A dissertation presented by Eli Cook to Department of the History of American Civilization in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of American Civilization Harvard University Cambridge, MA May, 2013 © 2013 Eli Cook All rights reserved. Professor Sven Beckert Eli Cook Professor Liz Cohen The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life Abstract A history of statistical economic indicators in America, this dissertation uncovers the protracted struggle which took place in the nineteenth century over how economic life should be quantified, how social progress should be valued and how American prosperity should be measured. By revealing the historical origins of contemporary indicators such as Gross Domestic Product, and by uncovering the alternative measures that ended up on the losing side of history, this work denaturalizes the seemingly objective nature of modern economic indicators while offering a fresh take on the rise of American capitalism. Tracing the contested nature of statistical indicators since the time when Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton first debated how prosperity should be measured, this dissertation details how quantification techniques developed by profit-minded businessmen eventually came to be used not only to manage a railroad corporation, administer a slave plantation or run a textile factory but also to organize, discipline, manage and make sense of American society as a whole. The micro-managing of wage workers led to macroeconomic indicators, slave plantation accounts led to national productivity statistics, corporate cost-accounting led to cost-of-living indices and the bottom line became the American government’s top priority. While these capitalist statistics were being institutionalized as the benchmarks of American progress, previously popular measures which gauged such social issues as propertied independence, iii exploitation, poverty, inequality, gender discrimination, social mobility, insanity, education, incarceration and even prostitution mostly fell by the wayside by 1900. The ramifications of this historical development were enormous as these priced measures of productivity, consumerism, and market growth helped to transform the maximization of capitalist production and consumption into the main objective of American society, all the while turning monetary prices into the standard unit for measuring not only our goods but our planet, our society, our future and ourselves. Distinct from mere commodification, this dissertation refers to this process as the “capitalization” of everyday life because these figures treated American society like one big capitalized investment and its human citizens as human capital. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................................................. vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Seeing like a Capitalist: The Hamiltonian Origins of How Capitalists Count ................................................ 34 Seeing Like a Yeoman: Patriarchal Commercialism in the Early Republic ................................................... 70 Lots of Growth: Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine’s Frontier of Human Capital ................................................ 103 An Asylum in Numbers: The Rise of Moral Statistics in Jacksonian America ............................................ 144 Tale of Two Capitalisms: The Rise of Growth Statistics in Antebellum America ..................................... 196 Capitalization and its Discontents: Labor Statistics in Gilded Age America .............................................. 250 Epilogue .................................................................................................................................................................................. 304 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................................................... 318 v List of Figures Figure 1: Samuel Blodget’s Financial Money Meter 61 Figure 2: Samuel Blodget's pricing of the American people 63 Figure 3: An engraved portrait of John Adams 93 Figure 4: 1790 census page 96 Figure 5: Jessup Scott’s growth chart 128 Figure 6: Percentage of growth by city population 141 Figure 7: Percentage of dividend given by Boston banks. 141 Figure 8: Pauper Statistics 154 Figure 9: Benjamin Rush's Moral and Physical Thermometer 159 Figure 10: Church temperance statistics 160 Figure 11: Shattuck's Wealth Pyramid 179 Figure 12: Canal Toll Statistics 238 Figure 13: Calculating the Railroad Business 244 Figure 14: Aldrich Report 251 Figure 15: The alternative statistics of the Massachusetts Bureau 259 Figure 16: Atkinson's cost of living statistics 287 Figure 17: Massachusetts Bureau's dietary schedule 288 Figure 18: The Aladdin Oven. 292 Figure 19: Incarceration rates of OECD countries 308 vi Acknowledgements Stepping out of one of my first introductory economics classes at Tel Aviv University, my head whirring with differential math equations with which I had been instructed to maximize profits, I entered into an American history class taught by Michael Zakim and discovered my calling. Instead of being given answers, as in the economics class, I was confronted with an awe-inspiring set of questions not only about the rise of capitalism in America, but the very nature of the human experience in modern times. For opening this world to me, Michael, I thank you. For being a wonderful mentor, friend, and supporter ever since, I thank you again. Visiting Harvard a few years later, Professor Sven Beckert immediately took a disheveled Israeli with a penchant for rants under his wing, just as his Program on the Study of Capitalism was taking off. He has lent an enthusiastic helping hand ever since, teaching me the tiniest intricacies of American history while pushing me to ask the biggest questions. Providing endless wisdom (and her office!) not only as my advisor but lately as my dean as well, Professor Liz Cohen has been equally supportive, constantly encouraging and challenging me to refine, rewrite and rethink the basic contours of this project. Big thanks are also in order to Professor Chris Desan, who not only taught me how central banks work but also was willing to slog through a summer of neoclassical economics. Professor Morton Horwitz served as the elder statesmen of this project, and his intellectual fingerprints can be found in many of the following pages. There are so many debts to so many others. I don’t know where I would be without Noam Maggor, who showed me the ropes, made me feel at home, and devoted hours upon hours to talking about so many of the ideas that went into this work. Brian Hochman, David Kim, Nick Donofrio, Brian McCammack, Pete L’Official, Jack Hamilton, Tim McGrath, vii George Blaustein and Derek Etkin let an undrafted, foreign walk-on join not only the American Civilization Basketball League but their amazing group of friends. Joshua Specht, Andrew Pope, Eitan Kensky, Charles Petersen, Summer Shafer, Marisa Egerstrom and Jeremy Zallen are awesome. It was always a pleasure to talk slavery or bullpens with Katherine Stephens during some quality tent time. Whether a question about cost- accounting or the job market, Caitlin Rosenthal was always there for me when I needed her, and that was early and often. Nadav Orian Peer’s never-ending thirst for knowledge was contagiously magnificent. Everyone should have an old army buddy like Adam Shinar. If this dissertation has any real, empirical grounding in nitty-gritty political economy, it’s because I had the pleasure of making Rudi Batzell’s acquaintance. Thanks to Rudi, Shaun Nichols, Liat Spiro, Jed Schwartz and many others, I always looked forward to yet another boisterous debate at the capitalism reading group as I was cleaning up baby vomit. From an early age, my parents inspired me to be an intellectual. Dad, it is far from a coincidence that I followed in your footsteps. Be it 2AM sessions on the porch about gender history or help in the archives, my mother has been a big part of this project. While this dissertation has unfortunately placed Benjy far away, he still remains close and has offered many insights that have shaped this work (could