“Preserving the American Economic Century in an Era of Anxious Capitalism,” 4/4 KICD Colloquium with Oxford-RAI Director of Academic Programs Daniel Rowe

In his April 4 talk at the Kinder Institute, Daniel Rowe, Director of Academic Programs at Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, will explore the myriad factors—from domestic policymaking to the collapse of the Soviet Union—that brought the US to the brink of economic crisis in the 1970s and 80s only to walk the nation back from cliff’s edge and restore faith in American capitalism. The talk will be held at 3:30pm in Jesse 410.

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, the very foundations of the United States’ mid-twentieth century prosperity were rocked by a series of overlapping financial and industrial crises. Inflation and interest rates soared, the nation’s largest cities and corporations teetered on the brink of collapse, and hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Japan’s rapid economic ascent during the same period only intensified US fears of national decline further still. In this environment, it was widely believed that the global economic centre of gravity would be determined by decisions and actions taken over a short time period. Renewed national growth, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Japan’s economic implosion restored elite faith in the supremacy of American capitalism and muted fears about waning US primacy. However, these fears never disappeared completely, and post-Cold War triumphalism never reigned entirely supreme.

This talk takes a wide-angled look at policymaking across the last half century and shines a spotlight on the contested and fluid relationship between the US state and markets at the high point of US deindustrialization and computermania.

Daniel Rowe is the Director of Academic Programs at Oxford University’s Rothermere American and a Teaching and Research Associate in the History Faculty. He is a historian of the twentieth century United States and wider world with a special interest in political economy, policy, urban, and labor history. He is the author of a forthcoming study, State of Development: Preserving the American Economic Century in an Era of Anxious Capitalism (Columbia University Press), of political economy in the late twentieth century. At Oxford, he teaches History and Politics at undergraduate and graduate levels.