scholarly journals Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-680
Author(s):  
SHANE HAMILTON

A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. As managers and policy makers responded to those problems from the 1940s on, they reshaped federal crop insurance in ways that increasingly made the scheme a lever of financialization, a means of disciplining individual farmers to think of farming in abstract terms of risk management. Crop insurance became intertwined with important changes in the economic context of agriculture by the 1960s, including the emergence of the “technological treadmill,” permanently embedding financialized risk management into the political economy of American agriculture.

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Reyes ◽  
Emile Elias ◽  
Andrew Eischens ◽  
Mark Shilts

A fact sheet produced by the USDA Southwest Climate Hub using publicly available crop insurance data from the USDA Risk Management Agency for the United States.


1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-212
Author(s):  
Ronald L. Tracy

Although the United has been in a recovery since 1982, for many it has been disappointing since it does not seem likely that it will lead to both stable prices (about 2 percent inflation) and low levels of unemployment (about 4 percent) that were the hallmark of the 1960s. This has led Edmund Phelps to question the automatic mechanism for recovery from monetary disturbances. Certainly in the years prior to the Great Depression when the economy recovered, it did so without governmental action. Since the 1930s, governmental activism has become commonplace; hence Phelps suggests that a revised theory may indicate that the recovery will not proceed to the “normal” range but only to the “broad territory of the normal” without some active policy push. The key to accepting this revised theory is identifying what is “normal” and what are monetary disturbances.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-422
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein ◽  
Cedric de Leon ◽  
Judith Stepan-Norris ◽  
Barry Eidlin

AbstractBarry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin argues that the divergence resulted from different ruling party responses to working class upsurge in both countries during the Great Depression and World War II. In Canada, an initially more hostile state response ended up embedding “the class idea”—the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category—more deeply in policies, policies, and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced to “special interests.” In this symposium, three noted labor scholars engage critically with the book. Cedric de Leon interrogates Eidlin’s account of the role of racial divisions in explaining divergence, noting “more persistence and convergence than there is rupture and divergence” between these two countries on this issue. Nelson Lichtenstein’s critique focuses on the exceptionally vociferous character of US employer hostility, which he argues that Eidlin downplays. And Judith Stepan-Norris notes the surprising lack of actual class actors in a book about class organization, while raising interpretive questions about the relation between labor and the Communist Party in both countries. Eidlin concludes the symposium with a response to the critics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-417
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein ◽  
Cedric de Leon ◽  
Judith Stepan-Norris ◽  
Barry Eidlin

AbstractBarry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin argues that the divergence resulted from different ruling party responses to working class upsurge in both countries during the Great Depression and World War II. In Canada, an initially more hostile state response ended up embedding “the class idea”—the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category—more deeply in policies, policies, and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced to “special interests.” In this symposium, three noted labor scholars engage critically with the book. Cedric de Leon interrogates Eidlin’s account of the role of racial divisions in explaining divergence, noting “more persistence and convergence than there is rupture and divergence” between these two countries on this issue. Nelson Lichtenstein’s critique focuses on the exceptionally vociferous character of US employer hostility, which he argues that Eidlin downplays. And Judith Stepan-Norris notes the surprising lack of actual class actors in a book about class organization, while raising interpretive questions about the relation between labor and the Communist Party in both countries. Eidlin concludes the symposium with a response to the critics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-67
Author(s):  
Mimi E. Kim ◽  
Carina Gallo

Abstract SwedishUnder efterkrigstiden förändrades många västerländska länders kriminalpolitik i riktning mot välfärd och rehabilitering. Detta ideal fokuserade gärningsmannen, inte brottsoffret. Detta skulle snart komma att förändras. En av de första initiativ som togs för brottsoffer var brottsskadeersättning, en ekonomisk kompensation som infördes på 1960-talet. Denna artikel jämför utvecklingen av brottsskadeersättningi två länder, USA och Sverige, i relation till deras välfärds- och kriminalpolitik. Båda länderna initierade kompensationsreformer för brottsoffer ivälfärdsinstitutionella kontexter. Med stöd i en jämförande historisk fallstudiemetod visar artikeln dock att kompensationsreformerna i de två länderna skilde sig åt och kom att avspegla respektive lands välfärds- och kriminalpolitik. De första svenska kompensationsreformerna förankrades som en socialförsäkringsfråga, medan deras motsvarigheter i USA snabbt banade väg för mer straffinriktade program.Abstract EnglishIn the post-war period, many Westernized countries advanced toward more rehabilitative and welfarist ideals informing crime policies. These ideals centered on the offending individual, not the victim. This was soon to change. Victim compensation programs were one of the first initiatives taken for victims of crime with the first established in the 1960s. This paper examines and compares the development of victim compensation programs in two countries with contrasting social welfare and penal policies, the United States and Sweden. Both countries developed victim compensation programs located within welfarist administrative institutions, suggesting common penal welfare frameworks and instruments. Using the comparative historical case study method, the study finds that formative victim compensation policies in the two countries differed widely, reflecting social welfare versus remedial welfare policies, and rehabilitative versus punitive carceral frameworks, respectively. Arguments upholding penal welfarist ideals and social insurance concerns underlay the early formation of Sweden’s victim compensation program and anchored subsequent developments while, in the United States, political conditions led to a rapid trajectory in more punitive directions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gremil Alessandro Naz

<p>This paper examines the changes in Filipino immigrants’ perceptions about themselves and of Americans before and after coming to the United States. Filipinos have a general perception of themselves as an ethnic group. They also have perceptions about Americans whose media products regularly reach the Philippines. Eleven Filipinos who have permanently migrated to the US were interviewed about their perceptions of Filipinos and Americans. Before coming to the US, they saw themselves as hardworking, family-oriented, poor, shy, corrupt, proud, adaptable, fatalistic, humble, adventurous, persevering, gossipmonger, and happy. They described Americans as rich, arrogant, educated, workaholic, proud, powerful, spoiled, helpful, boastful, materialistic, individualistic, talented, domineering, friendly, accommodating, helpful, clean, and kind. Most of the respondents changed their perceptions of Filipinos and of Americans after coming to the US. They now view Filipinos as having acquired American values or “Americanized.” On the other hand, they stopped perceiving Americans as a homogenous group possessing the same values after they got into direct contact with them. The findings validate social perception and appraisal theory, and symbolic interaction theory.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 1272-1311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Dobbie ◽  
Jae Song

Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure data to estimate the impact of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on subsequent outcomes. Exploiting the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to judges, we find that Chapter 13 protection increases annual earnings by $5,562, decreases five-year mortality by 1.2 percentage points, and decreases five-year foreclo-sure rates by 19.1 percentage points. These results come primarily from the deterioration of outcomes among dismissed filers, not gains by granted filers. (JEL D14, I12, J22, J31, K35)


Author(s):  
Lindsay K. Admon ◽  
Vanessa K. Dalton ◽  
Giselle E. Kolenic ◽  
Susan L. Ettner ◽  
Anca Tilea ◽  
...  

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