@article{Capitalism:7505,
      recid = {7505},
      author = {Foster, Nicholas David},
      title = {Country On FIRE: The Virtuous Producer In The Era Of  Finance Capitalism},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-08},
      pages = {300},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines how congressional and private  sector decision makers of the 1980s understood financial  production, and how this understanding shaped policy. The  years between 1980 and 2008 have been defined as the  “Neoliberal Order.”  My analysis does not challenge this  categorization. However, I aim to refocus the point of  rupture from political to economic—from the election of  Ronald Reagan to the Volcker Shock. Financialization remade  how the economy functioned, constraining what was  previously thought possible while also creating unintended  consequences to political decision making.

Placing this  dramatic economic shift, rather than political, at the  center of rupture opens a new path of analysis. Primarily,  this project illuminates how confused, chaotic, and  contingent the transformation of the political economy  during the 1980s was. Despite the perceived success of the  Reagan Revolution, the chapters ahead illustrate how there  truly was no master plan. Important legislative actions,  from tax reform to deregulating the savings and loan  industry, were reactions to quickly changing circumstances  that were beyond the direct control—and most importantly,  the understanding—of decision makers. Despite the chaos, a  new logic emerged. Financiers were recognized as wealth  creators, who gave new life to the moribund economy,  leading the way for economic growth and prosperity into the  coming decades.

I argue that even as financialization  wrought a new type of capitalism, older cultural narratives  framed understandings of how to formulate and implement  policy. Specifically, the virtuous producer ideal continued  to shape political imaginations for problem-solving in this  new economic era. Finance capitalism required a reworking  of the political and cultural imagination to not only what  production was, but also who produced wealth and what were  the new productive uses of capital. The cultural narrative  of virtuous production allowed for the concretized  understanding of the political economy in a time of  fracture.

After the Volcker Shock, American financial  markets became the home to unprecedented foreign  investment, creating a type of financial monopoly power—and  thus economic growth—that replaced industrial  manufacturing. By the end of the 1980s, financial  institutions that provided credit and created speculative  markets were recognized as the new engines of growth.  Financiers representing the supply side of the economy were  thus labeled the virtuous producer of the new era.	
The  Reagan Revolution, and the following Neoliberal Order, were  shaped by this new paradigm. Although the supply-side  revolution, and attenuating economic instability and  inequality, correlate with the transition, the political  imaginings of the Reagan right were not the center of  change. Rather the Volcker Shock created a new economic  paradigm that ushered in the transition from industrial to  financial production. Congressional action to multiple  crises caused by this transformation throughout the Reagan  presidency spurred the transformation of the virtuous  producer ideal to support the supply side of the economy.  This new framework allows us to understand how a new type  of conventional wisdom emerged from an era defined by chaos  and misunderstanding. The virtuous producer remained at the  heart of the American political economy.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7505},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7505},
}