Reference

Notes

How to Get Rich in American History辅助资料本页已读 0%

Introduction: Go Ahead!

  1. 1Where I was brought up, we never talked about money: Mark Twain as quoted by Norman Hapgood in The Literary Digest 109 (1931), 43. My thanks to Twain scholar Barbara Schmidt for helping me verify the quote.
  2. 2no one gets ahead anymore: Reverend Newman Smyth said in the nineteenth century that “some unseen yet hostile powers are breaking out the rungs of the ladder,” as quoted in Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 45–46.
  3. 3the Scots-Irish people of Appalachia: Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Crown, 2005); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2018). For a response to Webb’s narrative, see Warren R. Hofstra, ed., Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2011).

Chapter 1: Getting ahead is Easier than Ever

  1. 1Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state: On “the Mississippi Question,” see Douglas Carswell, “Is Mississippi Really as Poor as Britain,” The Atlantic (August 18, 2023). Here, I use 2023 GDP per capita numbers from the World Bank (UK = $49,463) and the US Department of Commerce (Mississippi $49,593). The Mississippi number is per capita income, which is actually lower than GDP per capita. World Bank, “GDP per capita (current US$)—United Kingdom,” World Bank Data (2023); “SASUMMARY State annual summary statistics: personal income, GDP, consumer spending, price indexes, and employment,” US Bureau of Economic Analysis (April 17, 2025); Servet Yanatma, “Poorest US state rivals Germany: GDP per capita in US and Europe,” Euronews (March 1, 2025).
  2. 2“It’s stunning to me how few say, oh, could you help me get into Denmark?” Tyler Cowen, “Is the American Dream Alive and Well? A Free Press Debate” The Free Press (September 13, 2024).
  3. 3obtained the right to land: Russel R. Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Stanley Katz, John M. Murrin, and Douglas Greenberg, eds., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), 131–153.
  4. 4“poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!”: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975), 24–26.
  5. 5In 1870, food, rent, and clothing: “Consumer expenditures in 2023,” United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (December 2024); Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
  6. 6“Ours is the age of suicide and mysterious disappearances”: Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6–7. New-Yorker and The New Yorker are not the same publication.
  7. 7median income has risen: Wage increases have slowed, not reversed, since the post-war boom. The cultural hue and cry that labor productivity increased more (it did, by over 100 percent) and CEO-to-worker pay increased more (from 20-to-1 to today’s 350-to-1) is not the same thing as arguing that median personal income has not grown (it has). Many “wages have stagnated” graphs also show only hourly wages without showing retirement contributions, healthcare, etc. U.S. Census Bureau, Real Median Personal Income in the United States [MEPAINUSA672N], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N, April 28, 2025.
  8. 8even left-leaning groups admit wages are up: Paul Krugman, “What isn’t the matter with American workers?” Economic Innovation Group ( June 2024); Elise Gould, Katherine DeCourcy, Joe Fast, and Ben Zipperer, “Strong wage growth for low-wage workers bucks the historic trend,” Economic Policy Institute, March 24, 2025.
  9. 9The median weekly earnings of high-school graduates: Jeremy Horpedahl, “The Middle/Working Class Has Not Been ‘Hollowed Out,’” Economists Writing Every Day (May 7, 2025); source data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS and US Bureau of Economic Analysis; Michael B. Strain, The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It) (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2020), 33–100.
  10. 10you are probably going to hang on to about eighty-four: John Burn-Murdoch, “Why are Americans dying so young?” Financial Times, March 31, 2023.
  11. 11the American Dream is no longer possible: Jere Behrman and Paul Taubman, “Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the United States: Some Estimates and a Test of Becker’s Intergenerational Endowment Model,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 67, no. 1 (February 1985), 144–51; Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 ( June 2014), 1553–1623; Gabriel Borelli, “Americans are split over the state of the American dream,” Pew Research Center, July 2, 2024.
  12. 12“Fear-Setting”: Tim Ferris, “Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month,” May 15, 2017.

Chapter 2: Fast Time, Slow Time

  1. 1Fast Time and Slow Time: The technical term should be fractal time and essentially applies the great French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s concepts of “slow random” and “wild random” to the financial lives of everyday people. In fractal time, volatility “clusters here and there. Periods of big price changes group together, interspersed by intervals of more sedate variation.” Mandelbrot was able to prove that, in markets, “Time does not run in a straight line…It stretches and shrinks.” In fractal time, what speeds up or slows down is volatility. I call this Fast and Slow Time. Mandelbrot suggested that forces of price and chronology created “trading time,” which could speed up or slow down under volatility. I propose using this as a helpful concept for people’s financial lives in general. Slow Time and Fast Time are taken from two of Mandelbrot’s stages of randomness: slow random and wild random. The third state (mild random) is a world of only binary choices (heads/ tails) and does not apply to daily life outside of a casino. Relatively few historians have tried to integrate fractals and chaos theory into historical analysis. Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence, Annotated Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 264, 290. See also H.W. Brands, “Fractal History, or Clio and the Chaotics,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 495–510; David F. Lindenfeld, “Causality, Chaos Theory, and the End of the Weimar Republic: A Commentary on Henry Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power,” History and Theory 38, no. 3 (October 1999), 291–99; Niall Ferguson, “Virtual History: Towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past,” in Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1–90; Noël Bonneuil, “The Mathematics of Time in History,” History and Theory 49 (December 2010), 28–46.
  2. 2Slow Time matters most: There are overlaps here with Nassim Taleb’s concept of the Black Swan and Extremistan. To understand the relationship of the two, it is helpful to remember Mandelbrot’s three phases of randomness. Slow Time = Slow Randomness, and Fast Time = Wild Randomness. I am simply relabeling these for a general audience. Whereas all Black Swans cause Wild Random/Fast Time, not all Wild Random/Fast Times are caused by Black Swans. Sometimes volatility increases in ways reasonable minds could see coming, even if other reasonable minds disagreed. Slow Random/Slow Time, meanwhile, is not from Mediocristan, but rather are phases of life in Extremistan when the fat tail outcomes have not manifested themselves. There is no guarantee that Slow Time will be either long or short intervals between the next period of volatility, for the obvious reason that it is random. So, it is not true that Slow Time is necessarily longer in duration than Fast Time. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game (New York: Random House, 2021).
  3. 3Kim Basinger: “Actual Factual Gwinnett: Kim Basinger used to own Braselton?!,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 23, 2016; Kenna Simmons, “Ga Ga Land,” Georgia Trend, March 1, 2018, https://www.georgiatrend.com/2018/03/01/ga-ga-land/; “Georgia film space projected to overtake California for top spot,” Atlanta News First, September 13, 2023, https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/09/13/georgia-film-space-projected-overtake-california-top-spot/.
  4. 4outside Metro Atlanta: Simmons, “Ga Ga Land.”
  5. 5“delusion lies in the conception of time”: James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001), 110.
  6. 6Norman McGhee: Gregory S. Bell, In the Black: A History of African Americans on Wall Street (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), 31–35.
  7. 7shipping changed forever: Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
  8. 8“a historical sense”: Lewis B. Namier, Avenues of History (London: H. Hamilton, 1952).

Chapter 3: Crypto Isn’t the Future; It’s the Past

  1. 1broke but determined: William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852); for debates about the veracity of the story, see Geoffrey Sanborn, Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press), 50–51.
  2. 2Financial life was mind bogglingly complex: This chapter summarizes scholarship on early American money. Joshua R. Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2012); Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Robert E. Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalism, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Philip L. Mossman, Money of the American Colonies and Confederation: A Numismatic, Economic, and Historical Correlation (New York: The American Numismatic Society, 1993); Leslie V. Brock, The Currency of the American Colonies, 1700–1764: A Study in Colonial Finance and Imperial Relations (New York: Arno Press, 1975); E. James Ferguson, “Currency Finance: An Interpretation of Colonial Monetary Practices,” The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, vol. 10, no. 2 (April 1953), 153–180.
  3. 3“did not know a Set of Bills of Exchange”: Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered, 28.
  4. 4tornados of counterfeit money: Mossman, Money of the American Colonies and Confederation, 10: Richard Doty, “Book Review: Stephen Mihm’s Nation of Counterfeiters,” E-Sylum vol. 10, no. 40 (October 2007).
  5. 5“get rid of them as speedily as possible”: Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters, 13, 52, 71; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 174.
  6. 6A year later, the Court surprisingly reversed itself: Hepburn v. Griswold, 75 U.S. 603 (1869) was actually decided in early 1870 and declared the Legal Tender Acts issuance of federal currency unconstitutional. Overturned by the Legal Tender Cases (Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis), 78 U.S. 682 (1870).
  7. 7money is anything you can use to pay your debts and taxes: The theoretical underpinnings of this argument are in Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). Desan’s argument is especially popular among Modern Monetary Theorists. I agree with Desan’s view of money but find MMT well-intentioned but wrong.

Chapter 4: Financial Advice: Inflation’s Oops Baby

  1. 1life ended where it began: On medieval mobility, which could spike upward at times (and downward often) but largely pales compared to anything like modern economic upward mobility, see: Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 229–31; Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England 1536–1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), especially Table 4.5. On early modern mobility in England, see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On ancient wisdom, see Proverbs 21:5b; Ecclesiastes 5:13–14; 11:2; “Admonition of Singāla,” Dīgha Nīkāya 3.180, as translated in Ainslie T. Embree, ed., Sources of the Indian Tradition, Volume One (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 122–23.
  2. 2Even in permissive Amsterdam: Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 330.
  3. 3“of any avail to us”: J. Henry Hill as quoted in Sandage, Born Losers, 45.
  4. 4“Surprising Profits in Ducks”: Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough (New York: James Miller, 1866).
  5. 5Housekeeper’s Book explained in 1837: The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia: William Marshall & Co., 1837), 19.
  6. 6“She is a capitalist.”: John Howard Cromwell, The American Business Woman 2nd edition (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 94–95; C. W. Haskins, How to Keep Household Accounts: A Manual of Family Finance (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1903), 93.
  7. 7as detailed as most got: Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 304–08; Edwin T. Freedly, A Practical Treatise on Business: or, How to Get, Save, Spend, Give, Lend, and Bequeath Money (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853); Gordon W. Light, The Young Merchant (Boston: 1840); P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money (1880).
  8. 8Consider the insurance company: Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
  9. 9Workers spent more on insurance than on alcohol: Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12–61; Gordon, The Young Merchant, 308; June Alexander, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870–1920 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 175. The number was $0.77 a month on a monthly income of $42. But full employment for all months was rare, so their total outlay was closer to 3 percent.
  10. 10“speculitis”: David Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, 1880–1920,” The Journal of American History 93, no. 2, September 2006, 335–58.
  11. 11Many fell prey: Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, Nicky Marsh, Helen Paul, and James Taylor, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 119–21; Edward E. Beals, The Law of Financial Success 5th Edition (Chicago: The Fiduciary Press, 1907).
  12. 12rarely more than $100: Tyler Anbinder, “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts,” The Journal of American History 99, no. 3, December 2012, 741–770.
  13. 13Step 2 was insurance: This order comes up in nearly every pre-1940s book. Only after these were paper investments suggested. Those included bank funds at interest, state or federal bonds, stocks, and mining stocks. Thomas A. Davies, How to Make Money and How to Keep It (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1867); Albert W. Atwood, Putnam’s Investment Handbook: A Stimulus and Guide to Financial Independence (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 29–204; William A. Schnedler, How to Get Ahead Financially (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1926).
  14. 14“surest means of getting rid of money that is known”: Davies, How to Make Money and How to Keep It, 251; C. W. Taber, The Business of the Household (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1918), 424.
  15. 15cost of milk has gone up 1,700 percent: The price of milk actually went down for the majority of the nineteenth century, in some cases by half. 1912 Pages of Time Celebration (Pages of Time, 2015); for the price of milk in 1912, I’ve used the numbers for New York City. Report of the Committee on Markets, Prices and Costs of the New York State Food Investigation Commission (New York: Chas P. Young Co., August 1, 1912), 63; for 1812, I’ve actually used the numbers at the end of 1811 and the beginning of 1812, as the War of 1812 disrupted average annual prices downward and the prices for milk did not technically rebound to $0.24 until 1818. Carroll D. Wright, Comparative Wages, Prices, and Cost of Living (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1889), 89; May 2022 milk prices taken from USDA Retail Milk Prices Reports, May 18, 2022.
  16. 16inflation was functionally 0 percent: From 1793 to 1893, inflation was 0.07 percent. Edward F. McQuarrie, “Stocks for the Long Run? Sometimes Yes. Sometimes No.,” SSRN Paper 3805927 ( July 23, 2021), 20. There was a brief bout of Civil War inflation followed by decades of relative deflation.
  17. 17“when the dollar was worth 100 cents:” Maurice Le Bosquet, The Art of Spending: How to Live Better and Save More (Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1921), 8.
  18. 18more than one in four American households owned some kind of stock: 8 million households out of around 29 million total. Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 152; Gardiner C. Means, “The Diffusion of Stock Ownership in the United States,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 44, no. 4 (August 1930), 561–600.
  19. 19new investor guides in 1919: Albert W. Atwood, Putnam’s Investment Handbook: A Stimulus and Guide to Financial Independence (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 8; Isabel Ely Lord, Getting Your Money’s Worth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922); Benjamin R. Andrews, Economics of the Household: Its Administration and Finance (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924).
  20. 201921’s Financial Independence at Fifty: Victor de Villiers, Financial Independence at Fifty 2nd edition (New York: The Magazine of Wall Street, 1921. On financial courses, Enoch Burton Gowin, Developing Financial Skill (Boston: American Institute of Finance, 1922); Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, “The Economic Humanities and the History of Financial Advice,” American Literary History 31, no. 4 (2019), 675. On chartism, Charles H. Dow, Scientific Stock Speculation (New York: Magazine of Wall Street, 1920); Morris Niefield, The Personal Finance Business (New York: Harper & Bros, 1933). Note that “personal finance” was originally a term about lending to consumers, not handling your own money.
  21. 21threw a bombshell into the investing word: Edgar Lawrence Smith, Common Stocks as Long Term Investments (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925); Irving Fisher as quoted in Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance 3rd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 215–16.

Chapter 5: Gurus are Selling Something; You Should Buy

  1. 1Yale Professor of Finance James Choi: James J. Choi, “Popular Personal Financial Advice versus the Professors,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36, no. 4 (Fall 2022), 167–92.
  2. 2Nobel Prize in Economics: Peter Gosselin, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 264–65.
  3. 3“you have to learn by doing”: Gerald M. Loeb, The Battle for Investment Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 109.
  4. 4“so hard to spell”: William J. Bernstein, The Investor’s Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between (New York: Wiley, 2009), Chapter 4.
  5. 5Think and Grow Rich: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (Meriden, CN: The Ralston Society, 1937). The best overview of Hill’s nefarious career is Matt Novak, “The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time,” Gizmodo (December 16, 2016), https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-he-1789385645, accessed June 22, 2022; Michael J. Ritt and Kirk Landers, A Lifetime of Riches, revised edition (New York: Dutton, 1995); Richard Lingerman, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” The New York Times (August 13, 1995).
  6. 6Silvia Porter: Tracy Lucht, Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013); “Sylvia Porter, Financial Columnist, Is Dead at 77,” The New York Times ( June 7, 1991); Sylvia Porter, How to Make Money in Government Bonds (New York: Harper, 1939); Sylvia Porter, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book: How to Earn It, Spend It, Save It, Invest It, Borrow It—And Use It to Better Your Life (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1975), 8, 34–39, 793, 815–18.
  7. 7They flew away as financial planners: E. Denby Brandon Jr. and H. Oliver Welch, The History of Financial Planning: The Transformation of Financial Services (New York: Wiley, 2009).
  8. 8Harry Browne: Harry Browne, You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 130–64, 301–304.
  9. 9a board game called Cashflow: Robert T. Kiyosaki and Emi Kiyosaki, Rich Brother, Rich Sister: Two Different Paths to God (New York: Vanguard Press, 2009), 78–79; Rob Walker, “If I Were a Rich Dad: Why millions buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad’s nonsense,” Slate, June 20, 2002; John Reed, “Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Part 1,” https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651011-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-1. Accessed July 13, 2022.
  10. 10Suze Orman: Suze Orman, You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It: Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make When You Retire (New York: Newmarket Press, 1994); Lynn Andriani, “The Dollars and Sense of Suze Orman,” Publishers Weekly (February 24, 2003); Helaine Olen, Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry (New York: Portfolio, 2012), 27–47.
  11. 11Clark Howard: Clark Howard, interview by Joseph Moore, April 8, 2024.
  12. 12Journalists accuse him of profiting on people’s ignorance Olen, Pound Foolish, 61–69.
  13. 13finance professor Felix Chopra: Felix Chopra, “Media Persuasion and Consumption: Evidence from The Ramsey Show”: SSRN Paper 3992358 (November 12, 2023).
  14. 14“break free from broke”: George Kamel, Breaking Free from Broke: The Ultimate Guide to More Money and Less Stress (Nashville: Ramsey Press, 2024).

Chapter 6: Your Net Worth is Wrong (So I Made Myself a Billionaire)

  1. 1support the value of state currencies: Nic Carter, “Regime change in stablecoins,” Token 2049 Conference (September 15, 2023).
  2. 2the points are made up, so the score doesn’t matter: Whose Line Is It Anyway? Created by Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson; hosted by Drew Carey; Hat Trick Productions; aired July 16, 1998–December 15, 2007, on ABC.
  3. 3“No practical purpose is served”: C. W. Haskins, How to Keep Household Accounts: A Manual of Family Finance (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1903). See also Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003), 437–61.
  4. 4A preacher may be “of great worth” and penniless: Key to the Elements of Book-Keeping; in a series of short examples for the use of schools ( John Porteous, 1831).
  5. 5“he should know his ‘net worth’”: Herbert G. Stockwell, Net Worth and the Balance Sheet (Ronald Press Company, 1912), 6.; the term subsequently moved into agricultural accounting. C. E. Ladd, “A System of Farm Cost Accounting,” US Department of Agriculture Farmer’s Bulletin 572, March 4, 1914, 3.
  6. 6Social scientists in the 1940s: Family Income and Expenditures: Middle Atlantic and North Central Region, New England Region: Part 1, Family Income, Urban and Village Series, Miscellaneous Publication No. 370 (US Dept. of Agriculture: 1940), 443.
  7. 7The Supreme Court ruled: Holland v. United States, 348 U.S. 121 (1954).
  8. 8is “augmented wealth”: Edward N. Wolff, “Taxes and Revaluation of Household Wealth,” Journal of Pension Economics and Finance 21, no. 4 (2022), 537–564; Timm Bönke, Markus Grabka, Carsten Schröder, and Edward N. Wolff, “A Head-to-Head Comparison of Augmented Wealth in Germany and the United States,” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 12, issue 3, 2020, 1140–1180.
  9. 9One real dollar moves billions: Xavier Gabaix and Ralph S. Koijen, “In Search of the Origins of Financial Fluctuations: The Inelastic Market Hypothesis,” SSRN Working Paper 3686935 (December 23, 2023).
  10. 10Bezos doesn’t have billions of dollars: “Why Billionaires Pay So Little Tax,” The Daily, The New York Times ( June 15, 2021).
  11. 11market value thirty times greater than the entire stock market: Julian di Giovanni and Akito Matsumoto, “The Value of Human Capital Wealth,” Global COE Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series gd10–174, (2011: Institute of Economic Research).

Chapter 7: The Next Big Thing is A Bad Idea

  1. 1Determined not to miss my unicorn: “College project helps man with ALS say ‘I love you’ to his wife again,” Today, April 27, 2017, https://www.today.com/health/ visuals-technology-helps-man-als-tell-his-wife-i-love-t110845.
  2. 2“We are all so anxious to be rich in a hurry”: Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
  3. 3The sugar beet industry: Leonard J. Arrington, “Science, Government, and Enterprise in Economic Development: The Western Beet Sugar Industry,” Agricultural History 41, no. 1 ( January 1967), 1–18.
  4. 4The American Frugal Housewife: Kirk Jeffrey, “Marriage, Career, and Feminine Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: Reconstructing the Marital Experience of Lydia Maria Child, 1828–1874,” Feminist Studies2, no. 2/3 (1975), 113–130.
  5. 5Shale oil promised a bonanza: Anthony Andrews, “Oil Shale: History, Incentives, and Policy” (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, 2006), 8–13.
  6. 6St. Joseph: A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble: The Amazing Story of Land Grabbing, Speculations, and Booms from Colonial Days to the Present Times, reprint (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), LOC 6143; Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 3–12.
  7. 7“I wish I had a villa”: William Wirt as quoted in Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 154.
  8. 8the first search engine on the web: Aaron Wall, ed., “History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today,” Search Engine History, http://www.searchenginehistory.com/#:~:text=The%20first%20search%20engine%20created,it%20was%20shortened%20to%20Archie, accessed August 21, 2020.
  9. 9“When was steam power invented?”: Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 187, 219, 338–339; Richard Rhodes, “Energy Transitions: A Curious History,” paper presented at The Security Implications of Increased Global Reliance on Nuclear Power Conference, Stanford University, September 19, 2007, 11, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Rhodes-Energy_Transitions.pdf.
  10. 10McDonald’s the year I was born: McDonald’s annualized return was about 14 percent to the S&P’s 12 percent. That 2 percent difference compounds to big divergence: $100 in McDonald’s would be worth nearly $49,000 today versus $22,500 in the S&P.
  11. 11canal diggers increased wages dramatically: Most historians are pessimistic about canal workers’ financial lives. Illness, injury, weather, and the economic cycle drove wages lower than expected. This was especially true after 1837 when depression and waves of Irish immigration ballooned the labor pool. But there is bias in both directions. Immigrant laborers far surpassed income back home, many “underemployed” workers were simply farmers using canal pay to get ahead, and families regularly used strategies like boarders and butter (discussed in other chapters) to stretch their finances. If many workers made little and blew that on liquor, others found ways to exceed their expenses from 5 percent up to 50 percent a year. This excess they stowed away to buy farmland when the work went away. When managers shifted pay to daily “piece work” systems to save money, several determined Irish diggers managed to earn four times their normal wages. Everyone struggled; many struggles paid off. Peter Way, Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 105–30.

Chapter 8: Compound Interest and Passive Income are Overrated

  1. 1“He’ll go on doubling it till he dies”: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890), 131.
  2. 290 percent of Warren Buffett’s net worth: Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money (Petersfield, UK: Harriman House, 2020), 49–50.
  3. 3“The first rule of compounding is never interrupt it unnecessarily”: Peter D. Kaufman, ed., Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (2005).
  4. 4always underperforming in the game: Much the same point is made by Taleb, Skin in the Game, 223.
  5. 5“murder-suicide.”: Joseph Kopecky and Alan M. Taylor, “The Savings Glut of the Old: Population, Aging the Risk-Premium, and the Murder-Suicide of the Rentier,” NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 29944 (April 2022); Martin Wolf, “Wipe our rentiers with cheap money,” Financial Times, May 6, 2014.
  6. 6“I do not think it means what you think it means”: The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner (Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1987).
  7. 7“any business will run itself. It won’t”: H. L. Reade, Success in Business, or Money and How to Make It (Philadelphia: 1875), 69; Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in Leonard W. Labored, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 304–08.
  8. 8“a long life of industry, frugality, and attention”: Adam Smith as quoted in Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), 90. Emphasis added.
  9. 9“He and some daughters have died poor.”: Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Cornell University Press, 1992), 163.

Chapter 9: Diversification Won’t Make You Rich

  1. 1Charles Blunt: Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets, 215.
  2. 2the president of Harvard gave a speech about it: Josiah Quincy as quoted in Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 107.
  3. 3“becomes like other men”: P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money (New York: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1880).
  4. 4“always employed, effect nothing”: Light, The Young Merchant, 112–13.
  5. 5“Went too far, too many irons”: Sandage, Born Losers, 142.
  6. 6“then watch that basket”: Andrew Carnegie, The Empire of Business (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1917), 18.
  7. 7Hugh Collender: Tyler Anbinder, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024), 383–90.
  8. 8small-business owners worth $10 million or more: “Stealthy Wealthy Are Making Money with Boring Businesses,” The Wall Street Journal (May 19, 2025).
  9. 9“owned United States Government Bonds”: Sylvia Porter, as quoted in Tracy Lucht, Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 64.

Chapter 10: You Can Beat the Market; You Probably Shouldn’t

  1. 1“The Cramer Bounce”: Joseph Engelberg, Caroline Sasseville, and Jared Williams, “Market Madness? The Case of Mad Money,” Management Science 58, no. 2 (February 2012), 351–64. The original paper was posted to SSRN in 2005.
  2. 2“losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature”: Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or, A Good Hard Look at Wall Street ( John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 67. The book was originally published in 1940, also by John Wiley & Sons.
  3. 3Alfred Cowles: Alfred Cowles, III, “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?,” Econometrica 1, no. 3 ( July 1933), 309–24.
  4. 4How to Lose Your Money Prudently: The error in this experiment, if it really happened, is obvious. The random selections were from stocks that survived to be back tested, rather than from all those available at the start date. Fred C. Kelly, How to Lose Your Money Prudently (Philadelphia: Roland Swain Company, 1933), 21–23.
  5. 5A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street 13th edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024), 34, 163.
  6. 6semi-annual stock throwing competition: “Making Monkeys Out of the Sohn Investing Gurus,” The Wall Street Journal (May 6, 2019); “This Strategy Beat Top Funds—Don’t Try It,” The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2023).
  7. 7“that’s past my skill or anybody’s else’s”: Anne L. Murphy, “Dealing with Uncertainty: Managing Personal Investment in the Early English National Debt,” History 91, 302 (April 2006): 200–217, quote from 213.
  8. 8made the Beardstown Ladies investment superstars: The Beardstown Ladies Investment Club with Leslie Whitaker, The Beardstown Ladies Common-Sense Investment Guide: How We Beat the Stock Market—And How You Can Too (New York: Hyperion, 1994), xii, 105–109.
  9. 9Investment clubs became extremely popular: Brooke Harrington, Pop Finance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15; Janice M. Traflet, A Nation of Small Share-Holders: Marketing Wall Street After World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 141–43.
  10. 10By 1998 there were 37,000 groups nationwide: The National Association of Investors Corporation (NAIC), https://www.betterinvesting.org/about-us/our -history-of-helping-investors.
  11. 11lagged the market by a massive 20 percent annualized: Harrington, Pop Finance, 181.
  12. 12They had great fellowship, though: The ladies may have suffered from a simple data entry error, or they might have inadvertently included the proceeds from their How-To video series as market returns. “The Lessons from Beardstown,” Chicago Tribune (March 28, 1998), 22; Susan Chandler, “Fact-Checking a Good Investment: Beardstown Errors Raises Trust Issue,” Chicago Tribune (March 19, 1998), 1.
  13. 13The pros, meanwhile, were up double digits: Georgette Jansen, “Investment Dashboard: A Brief History of Our Contest,” Wall Street Journal (October 7, 1998); Georgette Jansen, “Investment Dartboard: Putting Away the Darts after 14 Years—The Wall Street Journal’s Dartboard Ends Its Run,” Wall Street Journal (18 April 2002); Jake Spencer, “This Strategy Beat Top Funds—Don’t Try It,” Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2023).
  14. 14none launches them out of the city: At a more technical level, this means the geometric Brownian motion of returns follows a Gaussian distribution where the vast majority of the time things will land at or near the middle.
  15. 15once every 6 trillion year phenomenon: Kevin Dowd, John Cotter, Chris Humphrey, and Margaret Woods, “How Unlucky is 25-Sigma?,” Journal of Portfolio Management 34, no. 4 (Summer 2008), 76–80.
  16. 16A portfolio missing the best ten days of the past 112 years: Housel, The Psychology of Money.
  17. 17Markets may not be perfectly efficient, but they are efficient enough: Burton G. Malkiel, “The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics,” CEPS Working Paper No. 91 (April 2003).
  18. 18Benjamin Graham: Joe Carlen, The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012), 17–34.
  19. 19the Chartists: Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh, “The Economic Humanities and the History of Financial Advice,” American Literary History 31, no. 4 (2019), 675.
  20. 20the stuff of finance courses: The first edition came out in 1948. Robert D. Edwards and John Magee, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, 5th edition (Springfield, MA: John Magee, 1966).
  21. 21these methods continued to be profitable: R. David McLean and Jeffrey Pontiff, “Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?,” The Journal of Finance 71, no. 1 (February 2016), 5–31.
  22. 22Buffett’s leverage has been estimated at around 1.7 to 1: Frazzini, et al. estimate this is 1.7 to 1 but part of that is float from his insurance companies, bringing the number down. Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller, and Lasse Heje Pedersen, “Buffett’s Alpha,” Financial Analsysts Journal 74, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter, 2018), 35–55.
  23. 23Berkshire Hathaway: Alex Crippen, “CNBC Transcript: Warren Buffett’s $200B Berkshire Blunder and the Valuable Lesson He Learned,” CNBC, October 18, 2010.
  24. 24most successful chart-following technical analysts: Jack D. Schwager, Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
  25. 25David Swensen: David F. Swensen, “Introduction,” in Charles D. Ellis, Winning the Loser’s Game (New York: McGraw Hill, 2017), xii.
  26. 26more than the original claims were worth: David Yaffe-Bellany and Matthew Goldstein, “The Hot New Market in Crypto? Trading FTX’s Carcass,” The New York Times (December 20, 2023).
  27. 27Large asset managers actually do beat the market: Klakow Akepanidtaworn, Rick Di Mascio, Alex Imas, and Lawrence Schmidt, “Selling Fast and Buying Slow: Heuristics and Trading Performance of Institutional Investors,” SSRN ( July 17, 2012).
  28. 28to boost morale: “Wall Street Curbs Young Bankers’ Hours After Overwork Outcry,” The Wall Street Journal (September 11, 2024).
  29. 29a forward-forward contract for millions in dynamic hedges: A forward-forward is a contract to exchange an asset at one period against the reverse trade at a later period. Nassim Taleb, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 32.

Chapter 11: Women were always Active Investors

  1. 1the investments of everyday women: For instance, the will of Mary Dutarque (d. 1767), who appears to be the mother of Lewis Dutarque, who acquired 105 East Bay St. in 1778. Neighboring 97 East Bay St. appears to have begun construction in the 1740s. Russell R. Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom: Capital and Growth in Early South Carolina,” The William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (October 1994), 659–76; Elizabeth M. Pruden, “Investing Widows: Autonomy in a Nascent Capitalist Society,” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 345.
  2. 2How to Lay a Nest Egg: Edgar Scott, How to Lay a Nest Egg: Financial Facts of Life for the Average Girl (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1950), 22, 48.
  3. 3neither belonged buying stocks: “A Citizen of Philadelphia,” as quoted in Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats,” 29. Emphasis added.
  4. 4East India and South Sea Companies: Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20.
  5. 5on the back of the nine of clubs: Sara T. Damiano, To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 60–61.
  6. 6The American Business Woman: texts referencing female mortgage issuance include Villiers, Financial Independence at Fifty, 119–120; Albert W. Atwood, Putnam’s Investment Handbook: A Stimulus and Guide to Financial Independence (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 60–61; John Howard Cromwell, The American Business Woman 2nd edition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 105–18.
  7. 7did not fall beneath feme covert laws: There is some debate about this. Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England, 31. For a counter perspective, some scholars argue men had to sign off on early stock transactions in London. Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets, 206.
  8. 8Abigail started buying government bonds: Abigail Adams’s investment life taken from Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 34–38; Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 168–238.
  9. 9Warren Buffett’s is 19.8 percent: John Divine and Wayne Duggan, “The Complete Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio,” U.S. News & World Reports (September 4, 2024).
  10. 10her generation’s best securities investor, period: Stephen Girard and others might have gotten better lifetime returns, but their investments were in actively managed merchant ventures and real estate rentals, not paper investments.
  11. 1110 percent of all financial deals: Scott C. Miller, “Ten Facts About the American Economy in the 18th Century,” MountVernon.org.
  12. 1225 percent of shares were in female hands: Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered, 68.
  13. 13“waitresses, telephone girls, cooks, and washerwomen”: Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 205.
  14. 14“as a businessman does”: Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, Nicky Marsh, Helen Paul, and James Taylor, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 170–71.
  15. 15A Woman and Her Money: Elizabeth Frazer, A Woman and Her Money (New York: George H. Doran, 1926).
  16. 16“Everybody Ought to Be Rich”: Samuel Crowther, “Everybody Ought to Be Rich: An Interview with John J. Raskob,” Ladies’ Home Journal (August 1929), 9, 39.
  17. 17the most expensive piece of jewelry she ever bought: George Robb, “Ladies of the Ticker: Pioneering Women Stockbrokers from the 1880s to the 1920s,” Financial History (Summer 2017), 20–23.
  18. 18“plant the Flag of women’s rebellion”: Victoria Woodhull as quoted in Miriam Brody, Victoria Woodhull: Free Spirit for Women’s Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 35.
  19. 19First Women’s Bank of New York in 1974: Ian Rose, “A Bank of Her Own,” JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/a-bank-of-her-own/, accessed September 8, 2023.

Chapter 12: Stocks used to be Bad for the Long Run

  1. 1suckers to take your place in the military draft: Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered, 128–29.
  2. 2a form of gambling: Newspapers ran columns notifying readers of the latest investment scams. “Honesty is the Best Policy,” American Agriculturalist 38 (1879), 8.
  3. 3governments effectively barred everyday people from buying stocks on the exchanges: This was a combination of opinions accompanied by state and federal regulatory actions. Bucket shops were completely eliminated by 1915, but police raids had begun in earnest around 1905–06. Board of Trade v. Christie Grain & Stock Co., 198 U.S. 236 (1905); Gatewood v. State of North Carolina, 203 U.S. 531 (1906); Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate.”
  4. 4stocks did not beat bonds throughout history: Edward F. McQuarrie, “Stocks for the Long Run? Sometimes Yes. Sometimes No.,” Financial Analysts Journal 80, no. 1 ( January 2024), 12–28; Edward F. McQuarrie, “Where Siegel Went Awry: Outdated Sources & Incomplete Data,” SSRN ( July 23, 2021) https://ssrn.com /abstract=3805927.
  5. 5The Second Bank of the United States: McQuarrie, “Where Siegel Went Awry,” 6.
  6. 6barely 1 percent of Americans owned stocks: Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street, 2.
  7. 7Jevons naturalized the business cycle: Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837, 238–41.
  8. 8you could measure the stock market: Charles H. Dow, Scientific Stock Speculation (New York: Magazine of Wall Street, 1920), 13; de Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith, 103–16; Crosthwaite, Invested, 177–79.
  9. 9“as a thermometer registers heat or cold”: Peter Hamilton, The Stock Market a Barometer: A Study of Its Forecast Value Based on Charles H. Dow’s Theory of the Price Movement (New York: Harper and Row, 1922).
  10. 1035 percent of funds into common stocks: Traflet, A Nation of Small Share-Holders, 82–97.
  11. 11Stock ownership was barely 20 percent of households in the early 1980s: John V. Duca and Mark Walker, “Why Has U.S. Stock Ownership Doubled Since the Early 1980s? Equity Participation Over the Past Half Century,” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper 2222 (November 2022).
  12. 12After new sources were uncovered: McQuarrie, “Stocks for the Long Run? Sometimes yes, Sometimes No.”; Seigel responded in an online debate forum, not wrongly pointing out that nineteenth-century bonds often had the same risk premium as modern stocks because America was still an emerging market. “New Insights on Stocks for the Long Run,” CFA Institute Research and Policy Center, https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/research/multimedia/2024/new-insights-on-stocks-for -the-long-run. For a view that emphasizes the twentieth-century superiority of stock market returns, see Elory Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton, UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook, 2024 (Zurich: UBS AG, 2024) and their earlier work, Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
  13. 13bring your own buckets: carrying costs: Planet Money, “Episode 598: The Very First Short” ( January 23, 2015), https://www.npr.org/transcripts/379416223, accessed May 18, 2022.
  14. 14Fewer than one in five companies even bother with dividends anymore: McQuarrie, “Stocks for the Long Run? Sometimes Yes, Sometimes No.”
  15. 15real profitability of U.S. companies increased: These calculations are on the real GAAP earnings and stock prices for S&P 500 companies (to control for the effect of stock buybacks on EPS).
  16. 16ETFs revolutionized by Vanguard in the 1970s: Robin Wigglesworth, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever (New York: Portfolio, 2021). On the inelastic market hypothesis, see Xavier Gabaix and Ralph S. Koijen, “In Search of the Origins of Financial Fluctuations: The Inelastic Market Hypothesis,” SSRN Working Paper 3686935 (December 23, 2023). For arguments that an ETF/Index doom loop is unlikely, see James J. Rowley, Jr., Inna Zorina, and Carol Zhu, “A drop in the bucket: Indexing’s share of U.S. trading activity,” Vanguard (2019); Kenechukwu Anadu, Mathias Kruttli, Patrick McCabe, Emilio Osambela, and Chae Hee Shin, “The Shift from Active to Passive Investing: Potential Risks to Financial Stability?,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2018–060, Washington Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, August 27, 2018.
  17. 17Every single dollar of excess gains from “the market” came from the leftover 4 percent: Globally the percentages are even worse. Just over 2 percent of global companies account for the difference between stocks and treasuries. Hendrik Bessembinder, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?,” Journal of Financial Economics 129, no. 3 (September 2018), 440–57; Hendrick Bessembinder, Te-Feng Chen Goeun Choi, and K.C. John Wei, “Long-Term Shareholder Returns: Evidence from 64,000 Global Stocks,” SSRN Paper # 3710251 (March 6, 2023).

Chapter 13: Financial Independence Isn’t What You Think

  1. 1Sylvester Judd: Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 3–6, 82, 91.
  2. 2Liberty without Labor: T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Modernization of Thrift,” in Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter, eds., Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 216; the bag is a playful tribute to the daily routine of cats, https://store .harpers.org/, accessed January 29, 2025.
  3. 3not yet synonymous with “not working”: George Emory Fellows, “Direct Relation of Industrial Education to National Prosperity,” Seventy-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Instruction (Shelton, CN: American Institute of Instruction, 1908), 36.
  4. 4Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (1892); Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, a Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 26 no. 4 (Winter 2006), 563–603.
  5. 5you didn’t have to enjoy it at all: Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837, 81.
  6. 6Thoreau, trapped in a lightning storm: Henry David Thoreau, Walden Vol. 2 (New York, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1982), 319–21.
  7. 7“frugality for gods and heroes”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer” (1841).
  8. 8“for an independent home”: Michael Zakim, “Producing Capitalism: The Clerk at Work,” in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 225.
  9. 9Ed Morris acted: The following taken from Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough (New York: James Miller, 1866); National Archives and Records Administration, Department of Commerce-Bureau of the Census: Seventh Census of the United States: 1860 (1860), Burlington, Burlington New Jersey; National Archives and Records Administration, Department of Commerce-Bureau of the Census: Eighth Census of the United States: 1870 (1870) Burlington, New Jersey.
  10. 10New York intellectual Ralph Borsodi: Ralph Borsodi, Flight From the City (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933).
  11. 11realistic manual went through an amazing twenty-four printings: Maurice Grenville Kains, Five Acres and Independence: A Practical Guide to the Selection and Management of the Small Farm (Pocket Books, 1948), 1–2.
  12. 12Scott and Helen Nearing fled to Vermont: Helen and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), x. For a helpful overview of the Nearings’ lives and political background, see Paul Greenberg’s review of their work (September 5, 2004), https:// paulgreenberg.org/PublishedNearings.htm, accessed August 10, 2023.
  13. 13all true, except for the parts that weren’t: Borsodi, Flight From the City, 98; Jean Hay Bright, Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life: Homesteading in the 1970s in the Shadows of Helen and Scott Nearing, and How It All—and They—Ended Up (Dixmont, ME: BrightBerry Press, 2013).
  14. 14nothing compared to the Nearings: Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xix, 245.
  15. 15“survive and thrive even if the stock market crashes”: Bianca Booker, “The Strange Allure of Pioneer Living,” The Atlantic, November 2018; thelunaticfarmer.com, accessed April 21, 2025.
  16. 16Victor de Villiers: de Villiers, Financial Independence at Fifty.
  17. 17indicted de Villiers for mail fraud: De Villiers was twice banned by the SEC from being involved in securities sales. His final indictment was for selling “questionable securities” to gold mines in Idaho. “Financial Writer Seized in Fraud,” The New York Times (August 3, 1938), 20; “Arrested in De Villiers Case,” The New York Times (August 13, 1938), 13; “Misbranding of Pankoka. U.S. v Pankoka Health Foods, Inc., Victor deVilliers, Nicholas P. Williams, Panaytos D. Panoulias, and Dr. Demetrius Mitsakos,” National Library of Medicine, https://fdanj.nlm.nih.gov/catalog /fdnj24041, accessed July 6, 2022.
  18. 18their big leap of financial faith: Paul Terhorst, Cashing In on the American Dream: How to Retire at 35 (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).
  19. 19“having enough—and then some”: Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life (New York: Penguin, 1992).
  20. 20At the dawn of Web 2.0: Jacob Fisker and Sam Dogen, “Who Started the FIRE Movement? The History of Financial Independence,” Financial Samurai, July 13, 2022.
  21. 21short handing financially independent, retired early to FI/RE: John P. Greaney, “Who coined the term FIRE (Financially Independent Retired Early)?” October 1, 2022. https://retireearlyhomepage.com/fire.html, accessed August 2, 2023.
  22. 22no less than fifteen distinct groups: Dominguez and Robin, Your Money or Your Life, 251–53; “15+ Types of FIRE and What They Mean,” The Motley Fool, https://www.fool.com/allstarmoney/originals/types-of-fire-what-they-mean/#:~:text=FIRE%20 %E2%80%94%20The%20OG%20term%20that,total%20yearly%20expenses%20by %2025, accessed July 13, 2022, and no longer available.
  23. 23cut roughly in half: “Down Shifters—A growing number of Americans are discovering that simplifying your life doesn’t have to mean pulling up roots or pinching pennies,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, August 1996, 32–38; “2022 Update: Real-Life Retiree Investment Returns,” https://retireearlyhomepage.com/reallife23.html, accessed August 22, 2023.
  24. 24“Idleness is but another name for misery”: Jacob Lund Fisker, “Early Retirement Extreme: The ten-year update,” getrichslowly.com (October 2, 2019); Ryan Ermey, “A millionaire early retiree earning $380,000 a year in passive income went back to work—but only lasted 4 months,” cnbc.com, August 2, 2024; Reade, Success in Business, 36.

Chapter 14: Real Estate is a Terrible Way to Make Money

  1. 1Johnny Appleseed was America’s first flipper: Natasha Geiling, “The Real Johnny Appleseed Brought Apples—and Booze—to the American Frontier,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 10, 2014). His real name was John Chapman, and his weirdness was not the apple planting but his extreme religious views that included doing no harm to animals, refusing to graft trees (for fear of hurting them), and giving away all his money.
  2. 2“all extraterrestrial objects”: Herb Auerbach with Ira Nadel, Placemakers: A Brief History of Real Estate Development (Vancouver, CA: Figure 1 Publishing, Inc., 2016), 184–191.
  3. 3The Lunar Registry has a website: https://lunarregistry.com/, accessed June 30, 2021.
  4. 4Real estate doesn’t naturally go up in value: Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger, “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012,” American Economic Review 107, no. 2, February 2017, 331–353, Figure 14; Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Historical Housing Prices Project, accessed September 9, 2025, https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-economic -analysis/historical-housing-prices.
  5. 5House prices went down 30 percent and stayed depressed for fifteen years: Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats, 73; Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16–32; Barton A. Smith and William P. Tesarek, “House prices and regional real estate cycles: market adjustments in Houston,” Journal of the American Real Estate & Urban Economics Association 19, no. 3, Fall 1991.
  6. 6what about Bath, New York: A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble: The Amazing Story of Land Grabbing, Speculations, and Booms from Colonial Days to the Present Times, reprint (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), LOC 1479.
  7. 7George Washington renovated Mount Vernon: John Berlau, George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World (All Points Books, 2020), 81, 103; Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Da Capo, 2016), 243.
  8. 8She bought lots in Philadelphia: Susan Branson, “Women and the Family Economy in the Early Republic: The Case of Elizabeth Meredith,” Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 47–71.
  9. 9“The Anti-Rent War”: Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
  10. 10he tried his hand at it, too: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (Henry Holt, 2009), 443, 523, 575.
  11. 11Of the 100 largest fortunes, precisely none were made in U.S. real estate: Lisa A. Keister, Getting Rich: America’s New Rich and How They Got That Way (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39; “The World’s Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes.com, accessed April 22, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/real-time -billionaires/.
  12. 12long-term, historic return on real estate: Òscar Jordâ, et al. “The Rate of Return of Everything, 1870–2015,” NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 24112, Table VII.

Chapter 15: House Hacks and Side Hustles Before Uber and Airbnb

  1. 1removing the stench from a dead body: Reddit, House_Hacking subreddit, “Roommate Death,” https://www.reddit.com/r/House_Hacking/comments/r04k4z /roommate_death/, accessed April 21, 2022.
  2. 2divided the £18 annual rent: Sharon V. Salinger and Charles Wetherell, “Wealth and Renting in Prerevolutionary Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 71, no. 4 (March 1985), 826–40.
  3. 3social worker in early twentieth-century Chicago: Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward, 110.
  4. 4nearly 50 percent of Hungarians and Italian immigrants: David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “The ‘Lodger Evil’ and the Transformation of Progressive Housing Reform, 1890–1930,” The Independent Review 20, no. 4 (Spring 2016), 485–508; Alexander, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 165–67.
  5. 520 percent of all homes were renting rooms: Peter R. Shergold, Working-Class Life: The “American Standard” in Comparative Perspective, 1899–1913 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 85–89.
  6. 6immigrant household kept three to four renters at any given time: Alexander, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 167.
  7. 7immigrant and black families increased income by 30 percent this way: David M. Reimers, “Immigrants and Thrift,” in Yates and Hunter, eds. Thrift and Thriving in America, 357.
  8. 8have savings left over at the end of each year: Beito and Beito, “The ‘Lodger Evil’ and the Transformation of Progressive Housing Reform,” 485–508.
  9. 9policeman John Taylor and his wife, Agnes, became homeowners: Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 17–18, 31–32.
  10. 10“most respectable forms of adding to the income”: The Weekly People quoted in Peter R. Shergold, Working-Class Life, 86.
  11. 11national craze for palm-leaf hats: Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 184–189, on butter 145.
  12. 12prize winning essay in Good Housekeeping: Annie Wade, “Hens and Chickens,” Good Housekeeping 9, no.1 (May 11, 1889), 32–35.
  13. 13“same profit that the owner of a store receives,”: Katina L. Manko, “Now You are in Business for Yourself: The Independent Contractors of the California Perfume Company, 1886–1938,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 5–26.; Howard R. Stanger, “The Larkin Clubs of Ten: Consumer Buying Clubs and Mail-Order Commerce, 1890–1940,” Enterprise & Society 9, no. 1 (March 2008), 125–164.
  14. 14two leading entrepreneurs of black women’s beauty products: A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001); Tyrone McKinley Freeman, Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020); Tiffany M. Gill, “Civic Beauty: Beauty Culturalists and the Politics of African American Female Entrepreneurship, 1900–1965,” Enterprise and Society vol. 5 No. 4 (December 2004), 583–93.
  15. 15It birthed multilevel marketing (MLM): Bridget Read, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (New York: Crown, 2025); Amway, “The Origins of Nutrilite: A Brand Ahead of Its Time,” Amway.com, https://www.amway.com/en _US/amway-insider/amway-voice/our-world/the-origins-of-nutrilite 2023; Mary Kay, Inc. “The Story of Mary Kay Inc.” 2013; William W. Keep and Peter Vander Nat, “Multilevel Marketing: A Historical Perspective,” Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) Vol. 16 (2013), 345–47; Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
  16. 16poor and likely to stay that way: Jessica K. Burch, “Soap and Hope,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 3 (December 2016), 741–51; John M. Taylor, “The case (for and) against Multi-level Marketing,” Consumer Awareness Institute (2011); Federal Trade Commission, “Multi-Level Marketing Businesses and Pyramid Schemes,” accessed September 6, 2023.
  17. 17George Jenkins: Emily Pawley, “The Balance Sheet of Nature: Calculating the New York Farm,” Doctoral Dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 84.
  18. 18The gig economy is not new: I’m referring to the gig economy here in the side hustle sense, not as a system of permanently temporary primary positions. On that, see Louis Hyman, Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to your Salary, Benefits, & Job Security (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Chapter 16: Yes, People Retired Before Social Security

  1. 1No one retired before Social Security: As one example among hundreds of headlines: “Before Social Security, Most Americans Faced Very Bleak Retirement,” The Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2004).
  2. 2Nobody can retire on Social Security: “America’s 60-Year-Olds are Staring at Financial Peril,” The Wall Street Journal ( July 22, 2024); “As Generation X Approaches Retirement, Reality Still Bites,” The Wall Street Journal (August 20, 2024).
  3. 3“Most Americans Faced Very Bleak Retirement”: The Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2004).
  4. 4“escape the economic problems of old age only by dying”: “Before Social Security, Most Americans Faced Very Bleak Retirement,” The Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2004).
  5. 5D. W. Griffith: What Shall We Do with Our Old? D. W. Griffith (Biograph Company New York, 1911).
  6. 6private pensions for workers: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
  7. 7“the near elimination of destitution among the elderly”: Jonathan Rauch, “America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old,” The Atlantic (December 10, 2024).
  8. 8things you get from economic growth are not the cause of that growth: The best quick summary of this idea is in Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011).
  9. 9covered around 40 percent of workers: “The Disappearing Defined Benefit Pension and Its Potential Impact on the Retirement Incomes of Baby Boomers,” Social Security Bulletin 69, no. 3, 2009; Mitchell A. Orenstein, Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of Risk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 14–15.
  10. 10“that I may not rust alive”: John Adams as quoted in Holton, Abigail Adams, 248.
  11. 11“as much for amusement as profit”: Emily Pawley, “The Balance Sheet of Nature: Calculating the New York Farm,” Doctoral Dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 86.
  12. 12teach old people to have fun: Dora L. Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 155; Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor, Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers’ Compensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
  13. 13give their jobs to younger workers: William Graebner, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 57, 87.
  14. 14why coddle the old: Graebner, A History of Retirement, 124–25.
  15. 15None of this existed for someone born in 1900: The phonograph was not widely available for home use in 1900 despite being invented in the 1880s.
  16. 16half of all workers over sixty-five had already retired: Costa, The Evolution of Retirement, 20.
  17. 17growing into this retirement thing: Some earlier scholars put the number of retired workers higher, but this appears to be a statistical error that counted seasonal unemployment as retirement. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 248; Costa, The Evolution of Retirement, 1; Graebner lists much higher stats for retirement in the nineteenth century. Graebner, A History of Retirement, 14.
  18. 18farmland could be leased to young farmers: Mitchell A. Orenstein, ed., Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of Risk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 11–12.
  19. 19sued for not taking care of elders: Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing, Investment: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 100.
  20. 20“is independent and self-respecting”: Isabel Ely Lord, Getting Your Money’s Worth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922), 196–98.
  21. 21peaked in 2000 at 83 percent: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm; see also “Labor force participation rate of men aged 65+ in the United States,” Our World in Data (accessed January 29, 2025).
  22. 221998, and 2001: “Retirement Problems,” The New York Times (January 26, 1958); “Personal Finance: Planning for Retirement,” The New York Times (February 17, 1964); “For Couples, Retirement Brings Joy and Stress,” The New York Times (September 29, 1988); “Social Insecurity; Poof! You Can Retire Rich,” The New York Times (December 20, 1988); “The Way We Live Now,” The New York Times (August 5, 2001).
  23. 23A 1980 bestseller claimed: Venita Van Caspel, Money Dynamics for the 1980s (Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, 1980), 4.
  24. 24pretty potent combination: By the 1990s, the median retiree’s wealth from Social Security was three times higher than their wealth from their stocks, bonds, or pensions. Costa, The Evolution of Retirement, 18.
  25. 25the financial returns of retiring in every year since 1877: see firecalc.com for a handy tool. The median 2025 401(k) retiree balance is $88,000 and the average is $272,000. The typical retiree household spends around $55,000 annually (though that is skewed high, since half of retirees spend less than $24,000 and about 80 percent spends less than $48,000). These scenarios use the function that adjusts spending in line with Ty Bernicke’s “Reality Retirement Planning: A New Paradigm for an Old Science,” Journal of Financial Planning 18 iss.6 ( July 2005), 56–61; for a more recent and rigorous study showing similarly poor prospects for historical returns and 410(k)-dependent retirements, see Edward F. McQuarrie and William J. Bernstein, “Expected Outcomes of 401(k) Investing: What Can History Tell Us?” SSRN Paper #5267778 (May 28, 2025).
  26. 26longitudinal study by Gallup: Frank Newport and Jeffrey M. Jones, “Why Americans Are Pleasantly Surprised in Retirement,” Gallup (August 22, 2024).
  27. 27Social Security is worth: The average benefit in summer of 2023 for retired workers was $1,838 per month. If we compare it to a 4 percent annuity (about the middle of going annuity benefit rates) that means the average American retires with about $550,000 worth of extra “net worth.” See: Teresa Ghilarducci, How to Retire With Enough Money and How to Know What Enough Is (New York: Workman, 2015), 100–101; Social Security Administration, “Monthly Statistical Snapshot, July 2023,” https://www.ssa. gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/, August 2023, accessed August 23, 2023.
  28. 28Salem, Massachusetts, spent half of tax revenue on poor relief: Lauren Weber, In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2009), 50.
  29. 2920 percent of Americans have only Social Security: Social Security Administration, “Income of the Population 65 or Older, 2014,” Social Security Bulletin 77, no. 2 (2017).

Chapter 17: Immigrants Make the Best Capitalists

  1. 1Pamphlets circulating in Guangdong, China: H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 2011), 55.
  2. 2first wave of Chinese immigrants: Betty Lee Sung, Mountain of Gold (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 194–95.
  3. 3Daddy has gone to Gold Mountain: Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Viking Press, 2003).
  4. 4savings rates of up to 60 percent: George Anthony Puffer, “From under the Sojourner’s Shadow: A Historiographical Study of Chinese Female Immigration to America, 1852–1882,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, No. 3 (Spring 1992), 41–67.
  5. 5the laundry business: Sung, Mountain of Gold, 187–201.
  6. 6Chinese families remained renters: Sung, Mountain of Gold, 187–201; F. John Delaney, “Tracking the American Dream: 50 Years of Housing History from the Census Bureau: 1940 to 1990,” US Department of Commerce, Current Housing Reports H121/94–1(May 1994) 29.
  7. 7interestingly, the Mississippi Delta: James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1987).
  8. 8All got tarred with the brush of underconsumption: Weber, In Cheap We Trust, 99–128.
  9. 9Immigrants in 1890s Pittsburgh were notorious savers: Frank Hatch Streightoff, The Standard of Living Among the Industrial People of America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 110.
  10. 10sought jobs in the highest-cost areas: Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success (New York: Public Affairs, 2022), 89.
  11. 11the ship Bachelor: Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 516.
  12. 12The largely immigrant Ford plant workers: Shergold, Working-Class Life, 226.
  13. 13more upwardly mobile than native born Americans: Abramitzky and Boustan, Streets of Gold, 3–8.

Chapter 18: Scams: The Nigerian Prince is actually From Spain

  1. 1“An Old Swindle” had returned: “An Old Swindle Revived,” The New York Times (March 20, 1898).
  2. 2fun features to the New World: W. P. Cumming, “Geographical Misconceptions of the Southeast in the Cartography of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southern History 4 (1938), 476–492.
  3. 3“part of Germany as for East-Florida”: Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 443.
  4. 4Sir George Macgregor: The Poyais story comes from Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 97.
  5. 5“Sundry Humbugs.”: “Many Millions of Dollars,” American Agriculturalist 38 (1879), 8.
  6. 6Humbugs fell into many categories: “The Natural History of Humbugs,” American Agriculturalist 34 (1875), 6; “Honesty is the Best Policy,” American Agriculturalist 38 (1879), 8; “Puts and Calls in Wheat,” American Agriculturalist 39 (1880), 7; “Consolidation of all the Lotteries,” American Agriculturalist 37 (1878), 82; “Too Sudden to be Trustworthy,” American Agriculturalist 42 (1887), 87; “Clark & Co. Adjusters of Claims,” American Agriculturalist 38 (1879), 8; “The Variety of Disguises,” American Agriculturalist 41 (1882), 5.
  7. 7to improve English harbors: de Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith, 50–51.
  8. 8most common speculation in colonial America: Lears, Something for Nothing, 70.
  9. 9exotic spiritualism to guide your bets: Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops, 142–43.
  10. 10as a reasonable financial strategy: Lears, Something for Nothing, 260–62.
  11. 11trading stamps: For an excellent online history of Stamp Trading by Jeff R. Lonto, “The Trading Stamp Story (or: When Trading Stamps Stuck),” 2013, http://www.studioz7.com/stamps.html, accessed February 27, 2023; Michael A. Turner, “Credit Card Rewards: Context, History, and Value: A White Paper on Credit Card Rewards, PERC Press (August, 2012); James J. Nagle, “Trading Stamps: A Long History,” The New York Times, December 26, 1971.
  12. 122.5 percent per transaction to the store: This number varies, and formulas are complex. The Motley Fool reported Visa’s base charge as between 1.29 percent and 2.54 percent, each with a sliding scale of additional fees of a nickel to a dime per swipe. Lyle Daly, “Average Credit Card Processing Fees and Costs in 2021,” April 13, 2021, https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card-processing -fees-costs-america/, accessed June 1, 2022.
  13. 13the upper-middle class: Scott Schuh, Oz Shy, and Joanna Stavins, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations,” Research Department Public Policy Discussion Papers 10–3, 2010; Ron Lieber, “The Damage of Card Rewards,” The New York Times, January 8, 2010.
  14. 14legislation to restrict or tax stamps and points: Josiah Baker, “Trading Stamps,” Vanderbilt Law Review 11, issue 2 (1958): 567–8; Ernest Gelhorn, “Trading Stamps, S&H, and the FTC’s Unfairness Doctrine,” Duke Law Journal no. 5 (November, 1983), 903–958; Ivan L. Preston, “Unfairness Developments in FTC Advertising Cases,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 14, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 318–321.

Chapter 19: Budgets are New; Hating them Isn’t

  1. 1a husband wrote a gleeful letter to the editor: Weber, In Cheap We Trust, 146.
  2. 2a wide range of sub-subcategories: Christine Frederick, Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1923), 274–77; on the phenomenon within Home Economics see Carolyn M. Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 90–92.
  3. 3a “sedentary man” versus an active one: Flora Thurston, “What should we Spend for Food?” The Delineator, October 1925, 21.
  4. 4required computational power: Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), 234.
  5. 5“down to the last string-bean”: Marjorie Hillis, Orchids on Your Budget: Live Smartly on What You Have (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1937), 138–39.
  6. 6like diets, nobody stuck to them: Dominguez and Robin, Your Money or Your Life, 76–108.
  7. 7take Elizabeth Meredith: Branson, “Women and the Family Economy in the Early Republic,” 47–71.
  8. 8“a sort of ‘shop boy’ for her”: Sandage, Born Losers, 240.
  9. 9Frances Green’s 1837 The Housekeeper’s Book: Frances Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia: William Marshall & Co., 1837), 18–19.
  10. 10money management to the wife: Some scholarship suggests this broke down by class, with working-class men and wealthy women considered to be most dangerous with money, leaving poor women and rich men to “money train” their spouse. Working-class women, for instance, were more likely to pawn goods and redeem them regularly in cash crunches, often making sure their husbands never found out. Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania, 2009 ),119–24; Damiano, To Her Credit; Louis Hyman, Borrow: The American Way of Debt (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 102.
  11. 11spent over half of their total income on food: This and the below information from Gordon, Table 2–2, 38. Technically the 50 percent is 54 percent and includes all perishables including alcohol, tobacco, heating oil, and reading materials. But these were negligible to the price to buy calories. Alcohol expenditures were significantly higher than today.
  12. 12The Latte Factor: David Bach and John David Mann, The Latte Factor: Why You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Live Rich (New York: Atria Books, 2019).
  13. 131872 book made the same point, except with beer: Reade, Success in Business, 83; for a female version, Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy, 119.
  14. 14seven gallons of alcohol a year: Mike Stobbe, “US drinking more now than just before Prohibition,” AP News ( January 14, 2020). Americans have held steady at a bit over two gallons per person since the 1920s.
  15. 15Booze, tobacco, cars, and a host of other “bad habits”: William A. Schnedler, How to Get Ahead Financially (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1926), 27–28; Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 133.
  16. 16“avoiding liquor”: Schnedler, How to Get Ahead Financially, 65; Elias St. Elmo Lewis, Financial Advertising (Indianapolis: Levey Bros. & Company, 1908), 839.
  17. 17significantly better than before: Alejandro Drexler, Greg Fischer, and Antoinette Schar, “Keeping It Simple: Financial Literacy and Rules of Thumb,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 6, no. 2 (April 2014), 1–31.

Chapter 20: Debt Isn’t (Necessarily) Dumb

  1. 1Most of America was bought on credit: The Young Man’s Guide 2nd edition (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, and Holden, 1834), 111; Sylvia Porter, Sylvia Porter’s New Money Book for the 80s: How to Beat the High Cost of Living—and Use Your Earnings, Credit, Savings and Investments to Better Your Life (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1979), 906–09; Lendol Calder, “Hard Payments: Consumer Credit and Thrift” in Joshua J. Yates and James Davison Hunter, eds., Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 323–25; Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 290–302; Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 241–64; Louis Hyman, Borrow: The American Way of Debt (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012).
  2. 2most widely shared financial advice in American history: Weber, In Cheap We Trust, 42.
  3. 3one in three history teachers’ first name is Coach: Technically 30 percent. Ryan T. Knowles, Andrea M. Hawkman, and Sarah R. Nielsen, “The social studies teacher-coach: A quantitative analysis comparing coaches and non-coaches across how/what they teach,” The Journal of Social Studies Research 44, 1 ( January 2020), 117–25.
  4. 4Boston Celtics tickets: Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes…and How to Correct Them (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 34.
  5. 5smartphones increased spending an additional 4 to 10 percent: “Using your phone to pay is convenient, but it can also mean you spend more,” NPR, April 7, 2024.
  6. 6Franklin got his start by going deeply into debt: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793), VII; J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1: Journalist, 1706–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 375–77.
  7. 7“raise all the money his friends can spare”: Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 304–08.
  8. 8“what cream is to a nice cup of coffee”: Freeman Hunt as quoted in Calder, 316.
  9. 9the richest man in the nation: Thomas M. Doerflinger, “Capital Generation in the New Nation: How Stephen Girard Made His First $735,872,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (October 2015), 623–658.
  10. 10fourth-richest American to ever live: Steve Hargreaves, “The richest Americans in history,” CNN Business ( June 2, 2014).
  11. 11mortgages between $500 and $800: Alexander, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 62–63.
  12. 12today’s median student-loan debt burden: “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023–May 2024,” U.S. Federal Reserve (May 31, 2024).
  13. 13Richard Anderson: Harry S. Stout, American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2017), 59–110.
  14. 14its own sad history: Anne Fleming, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Woloson, In Hock.

Chapter 21: The Government was Always Involved

  1. 1The government was always involved: Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010).
  2. 2the United States government became the largest bank in the world: Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats, 41.
  3. 3The cost of transportation dropped: Fraser, Every Man a Speculator (New York: Harper, 2005), 41–42.
  4. 4By 1929 there were nearly 800: Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street, 174–75.
  5. 5investment trusts managed to perform worse than the stocks they held: Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, 91.
  6. 6fawned over them, too: de Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith, 122; Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing, Investment: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 143; Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 226.
  7. 7It can destroy it, too: Brands, American Colossus, 334; N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (University of Chicago, 2014).
  8. 8Americans could not afford new clothes: Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day, April 30, 1946,” The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017), accessed January 11, 2025, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1946&_f =md000326.
  9. 9“Price Controls: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes”: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 347–48; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 101–09, 406; World Bank, “Price Controls: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes,” Policy Research Working Paper No. 9261. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020. SSRN, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3 /papers.cfm?abstract_id=3575173.
  10. 10America’s leading political thinkers: John Dean, Home Ownership: Is It Sound? (New York: Harper and Row, 1945); Nathan Straus, Two-Third of a Nation: A Housing Program (New York: Knopf, 1952); Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 106–14.

Chapter 22: Going Broke is Better than Ever

  1. 1James Wilson lived and lost the American dream: This account largely taken from Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Prometheus Books, 1992), 348–355.
  2. 2explained de Tocqueville: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, (1840), Chapter X.
  3. 3William McKinley and Donald Trump: Technically neither McKinley nor Trump ever declared bankruptcy. McKinley’s failure happened before the 1898 law allowed it, so his political friends set up a trust and he signed over his assets to the trust, essentially a private bankruptcy. Several of Trump’s business enterprises have filed for bankruptcy, but not the man himself.
  4. 4gone to Texas: Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837, 137.
  5. 540,000 citizens applied for relief: The accounts of bankruptcy records come from Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 2, 49–67.
  6. 6personal overspending played a role: In “the overwhelming majority of antebellum bankruptcies” excessive consumption was a factor. Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 26, 47, 61.
  7. 7died and left the cutlery to someone else: Miriam K. Davis, “My Wife’s Legacy: Chickens Counted that Never Hatched,” Good Housekeeping Vol. 8 No. 7 (February 2, 1889), 157.
  8. 8specified who should provide the barrels: Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 123.
  9. 9“a tree top is a proper place for a cradle”: Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, 151.
  10. 10buy tools or reserves for lean times: Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 115.
  11. 11Jonathon Amory and Henry Leeds: Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 59.
  12. 12The Beef Bonanza: How to Get Rich on the Plains: James S. Brisbin, The Beef Bonanza, or, How to Get Rich on the Plains (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1881).
  13. 13Harvard Graduates Magazine: Richard Allen, “Harvard Men in the Range Cattle Business,” Harvard Graduates Magazine 2 (1894), 183–92.
  14. 14Teddy Roosevelt: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: The Modern Library, 2001),187–212, 363–76, 644; Ray H. Mattison, “The Hard Winter and the Range Business,” The Montana Magazine of History 1, no. 4 (October 1951), 5–21.
  15. 15raised funds to expand their herds: Gene M. Grassley, “Teschemacher and deBillier Cattle Company: A Study of Eastern Capital on the Frontier,” Business History Review 33, no. 2 (Summer 1959), 121–37.
  16. 16give each player a three-card draw: Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003),100.
  17. 1740 percent rebounded to have financial success: Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 184–90.
  18. 18“to be strongly recommended”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), 295.

Chapter 23: Marriage (And Dual Incomes) Mattered…A Lot

  1. 1George Washington had diarrhea: Lengel, First Entrepreneur, 37–44.
  2. 2“sunny opportunity fund”: Benjamin R. Andrews, Economics of the Household: Its Administration and Finance (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1924), 129.
  3. 3A 2014 study of thousands of couples: Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M. Mialon, “‘A Diamond is Forever’ and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship Between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration,” Economic Inquiry 53 no. 4 (October 2015), 1919–30.
  4. 4compared to a lottery: Lears, Something for Nothing, 111–112.
  5. 5Early twentieth-century feminists: Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, “When George and Mary wish to marry,” The Delineator (September 1925), 21.
  6. 6Top traits for a wife: Light, The Young Merchant, 117; Edwin T. Freedly, A Practical Treatise on Business: or, How to Get, Save, Spend, Give, Lend, and Bequeath Money (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853), 52.
  7. 7Philadelphia print shop owner: Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough (New York: James Miller, 1866).
  8. 8“short engagements and long marriages”: George Horace Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1903), 303.
  9. 9“we are for early marriage”: Light, The Young Merchant, 116.
  10. 10“share and lighten your labor”: As quoted in Rockman, Scraping, 140–163.
  11. 11advertisements from a new widow: Branson, “Women and the Family Economy in the Early Republic,” 47–71; Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 183–206.
  12. 12“Plague of the Learned Wife”: Branson, “Women and the Family Economy in the Early Republic,” 47–71.
  13. 13they didn’t get enough hours: Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 98–99.
  14. 14fifty-eight hours on housework per week: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Average hours per day spent in selected household activities,” American Time Use Survey (2023).
  15. 15“while their husbands learned to farm”: Linda English, By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 92.
  16. 16crash course in dog breeding: J. W. Stephens, The Money-Maker’s Manual (New York: published by the author, 1866).
  17. 17colored ink and peppermint lozenges: How to Get Rich (Boston: A. B. Courtney, 1894).
  18. 18Volume II: Rise of the (Washing) Machines: Jeremy Greenwood, Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). See also Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (Holt Paperbacks, 2013); Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Heart to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
  19. 19one year of her life back: Valerie A. Ramey, “Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth-Century United States: New Estimates from Old Data” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 1 (March 2009), 1–47.
  20. 20survey of nearly 40,000 couples: J. J. Gladstone, E. N. Garbinksy, and C. Mogilner, “Pooling finances and relationship satisfaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 123, issue 6 (2022), 1293–1314.
  21. 21economic mobility in 4,000 families: Singles were 7 percent less likely to get ahead, and nearly all divorced men and women fell backwards. Richard H. Steckel and Jayanthi Krishman, “Wealth Mobility in America: A View from the National Longitudinal Survey (August 1992), NBER Working Paper No. w4137, p.10–11.
  22. 22percent of Americans who were married dropped: Rakesh Kochhar and Stella Sechopoulous, “How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades,” Pew Research Center (April 20, 2022); Richard Fry and Kim Parker, “Rising Share of US Adults are Living Without Spouse or Partner,” Pew Research Center (October 5, 2021); for an argument that selection bias explains this phenomenon, see Robert Nakosteen and Michael Zimmer, “Spouse Selection and Earnings: Evidence of Marital Sorting,” Economic Inquiry 31, no. 2 (April 2001), 201–13.
  23. 23without a live-in romantic mate: David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” The Atlantic (March 2020).
  24. 24married mothers under fifty-five: Brad Wilcox, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (New York: Broadside Books, 2024), xi, 36–56.
  25. 25The highest levels of financial satisfaction: CFPB, “Financial well-being in America,” (September 2017), 37.
  26. 26not a honeymoon effect: Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell, “How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point of Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 20 (December 2017), 373–90.
  27. 27Married black men make more than single white men: “Taking a Closer Look at Marital Status and the Earnings Gap” (September 21, 2020), Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
  28. 28A child born poor with two continuously married parents: 19 percent end in top quintile vs. 17 percent in bottom quintile. Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream,” The Brookings Essay (August 20, 2014).
  29. 29The effect of marriage on poor kids’ success: Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, issue 3 (August 2018), 1107–1162; W. Bradford Wilcox, Robert I. Lerman, and Joseph Price, “Mobility and money in U.S. states: the marriage effect,” Brookings Institution (December 7, 2015).
  30. 30Results are robust for gay couples, too: U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau Implements Improved Measurement of Same-Sex Couples,” (September 17, 2020); Michael E. Martell and Peyton Nash, “For Love and Money? Earnings and Marriage Among Same-Sex Couples,” Journal of Labor Research 41 (August 2020), 260–94; Lauren Bauer, Veronica Clevenstine, and Moriah Macklin, “Examining the economic status of same-gender relationship households,” Brookings Institution ( January 20, 2022).
  31. 31even twin studies: Kate Antonovics and Robert Town, “Are All the Good Men Married? Uncovering the Source of the Marital Wage Premium,” American Economic Review 94 no. 2 (May 2004), 317–21; S. Alexandra Burt, M. Brent Donnellan, and Mikhila N. Humbad, “Does Marrige Inhibit Antisocial Behavior? An Examination of Selection vs. Causation via a Longitudinal Twin Design,” Archive of General Psychiatry 67 no. 12 (December 2010), 1309–15.
  32. 32do happy successful people get and stay married: For a thorough review of the causation-versus-causality debate, see Brad Wilcox, “Marriage: America’s Keystone Institution” (December 31, 2024). Of note, robust studies show that after divorce, incomes go down, further suggesting that part of the marriage wage premium is in marriage itself. Andrew C. Johnson, Nolan G. Pope, and Maggie R. Jones, “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes,” NBER Working Paper 33776 (May 2025); Wilcox, Get Married.
  33. 33there is a “two-income trap”: Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

Chapter 24: Generational Wealth Doesn’t Last Long

  1. 1CNBC wrote an article: Courtney Connley, “3 money lessons from Jay-Z’s 4:44,” CNBC ( June 30, 2017).
  2. 2“if you don’t think ahead this will not be”: Abramitzky and Boustan, Streets of Gold, 92.
  3. 3For the middle class it’s nearly a third: Edward N. Wolf, A Century of Wealth in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 666.
  4. 4“makes grandchildren millionaires”: Reade, Success in Business, 60.
  5. 5Cooperstown, NY: Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (Vintage, 1995).
  6. 6what Hetty hated—charities: Charles Slack, Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 204–26.
  7. 7“sure to lose all they inherit”: P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money (1880).
  8. 8“that might be the end of the estate”: Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, 174.
  9. 990 percent of their grandchildren aren’t particularly wealthy: Slack, Hetty, 206–07; Priti Kalsi and Zachary Ward, “Gilded Age and Beyond: The Persistence of Elite Wealth in American History,” NBER Working Paper 33355 ( January, 2025).
  10. 10Jeffrey and his wife, Zipah: Rothman, Flush Times & Fever Dreams, 31.
  11. 11Irish immigrants of 1850s Newburyport, Massachusetts: Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 150–55.
  12. 12Progressive reformers estimated: Rensselaer and Rose, “When George and Mary wish to marry,” 53.

Chapter 25: People Really Did Get ahead, And You Can, Too

  1. 1Dad regularly voted for communists for president: Technically the communist party was rarely on the ballot in South Carolina after 1984, so he voted for the United Citizens Party.
  2. 2Loray Mill Strike of 1929: John A. Salmond, Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
  3. 3A study of nearly 1,000 shows: “Businessmen Behaving Badly: Prime Time’s World of Commerce,” Media Research Center ( June 16, 1997).
  4. 4Award-winning works assure us Twain was right: See Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1979); Billy G. Smith, The ‘Lower Sort’: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 128–138; Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). See Joseph P. Ferrie, “History Lessons: The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States since 1850,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005), 199–215; Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2015). See Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal & The Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016); Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximillian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940,” Science 356 iss. 6336 (April 28, 2017), 398–406. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Picador, 2001), 193–221; Peter Gosselin, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster, Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sean Mcelwee, “The myth destroying America: Why social mobility is beyond ordinary people’s control,” Salon (March 7, 2015); Clark, The Son Also Rises. For a more balanced view, see Julia B. Isaacs, Isabel V. Sawhill, and Ron Haskins, eds., Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew Charitable Trust, 2016).
  5. 5For evidence of mobility in American history, see Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1800–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) (over half the immigrants to New York City in the Gilded Age rose above their social station in one lifetime); Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (New York: Princeton University Press, 2000) (the upward mobility of Jewish families); Anbinder, Plentiful Country (nearly half of famine Irish immigrants rose in status in just ten years, and nearly half of all adults ended their lives in white-collar work).
  6. 6the number of people surviving on above $10 per day: The precise threshold is $10.81 in 2018 dollars. Joe Hasell and Max Roser, “How do we know the history of extreme poverty?” Our World in Data (February 5, 2019).
  7. 7President Ford’s America: I adjusted the 2017 figure of $30 in the Our World in Data set based on CPI data to 2021 dollars to arrive at $37. The official U.S. poverty line in 2021 was closer to $35 per day. Therefore, these numbers do not reflect the official U.S. poverty rate, which in 2021 was an even lower 11.6 percent; Joe Hasell, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Pablo Arriagada, “Poverty,” Our World in Data, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/poverty.
  8. 867 percent thought the government should forcibly break up strikes: Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915–45 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 40.
  9. 9a square foot of house hasn’t increased in price since the early 1980s: Mark J. Perry, “New US Homes Today are 1,000 Square Feet Larger than in 1973 and Living Space per Person Has Nearly Doubled,” AEI ( June 5, 2016); this is not the same as claiming construction labor productivity has increased or that input prices have decreased. For these arguments on cost indexes, see Brian Potter, “Does Construction Ever Get Cheaper?” Construction Physics (February 1, 2023).
  10. 10Zoning laws: Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom (Brentwood: Post Hill Press, 2022); Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).
  11. 11Studies of Revolutionary-era Philadelphia: Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton University Press, 1965); Sharon v. Salinger and Charles Wetherell, “Wealth and Renting in Prerevolutionary Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 71, no. 4 (March 1985), 826–40.
  12. 1228 percent of any city’s inhabitants: Keister, Getting Rich, 44; Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class, 120.
  13. 13within ten years of work: Hartmut Kaelble, Social Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Europe and America in Comparative Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 14–15.
  14. 14possessed more wealth than those they left behind: Richard H. Steckel, “A History of the Standard of Living in the United States,” Economic History Association, “EH.Net Encyclopedia,” edited by Robert Whaples ( July 21, 2002) https://eh.net /encyclopedia/a-history-of-the-standard-of-living-in-the-united-states/ (accessed December 13, 2023).
  15. 15overall mobility has slowed: Joseph P. Ferrie, “History Lessons: The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States since 1850,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005), 199–215; Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz, “Trends in U.S. Family Income Mobility, 1967–2004,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper no. 09–7 (August 20, 2009); Gerald Auten, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner, “Income Inequality, Mobility, and Turnover at the Top in the US, 1987–2010,” American Economic Review 103, no. 3 (May 2014), 168–72; Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream,” The Brookings Essay (August 20, 2014); Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, “The Decline in Lifetime Earnings Mobility in the U.S.: Evidence from Survey-Linked Administrative Data,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth (May 2016); Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximillian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940,” Science 356, issue 6336 (April 28, 2017), 398–406; Ariel Gelrud Shiro, Christopher Pulliam, John Sabelhaus, and Ember Smith, “Stuck on the Ladder: Intragenerational Wealth Mobility in the United States,” Brookings ( June 2022).
  16. 16precisely the same percentage as in Denmark: Julia B. Isaacs, “International Comparisons of Economic Mobility,” in Julia B. Isaacs, Isabel V. Sawhill, and Ron Haskins, eds., Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew Charitable Trust: 2016), Table 1.
  17. 17poverty stricken Europe: Erik Bengtsson, “Inequality and the working class in Scandinavia 1800–1910: Workers’ share of growing incomes,” Economic history of Europe: New approaches, new topics 13, issue 3 (October 2017), 180–89.
  18. 18Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found: CFPB, “Financial well-being in America” (September 2017), 32–33; CFPB, “Pathways to financial well-being: The role of financial capability” (September 2018), 9, 16.
  19. 19Hopeful views for the future significantly predicted long-term savings: J. J. Gladstone and J. Pomerance, “A glass half full of money: Dispositional optimism and wealth accumulation across the income spectrum,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 128, no. 1 (2025), 147–95.

Conclusion: The Real Lessons of Financial History

  1. 1The only savings rate that never failed was over 40 percent: Edward F. McQuarrie and William Bernstein, “Expected Outcomes of 401(k) Investing: What Can History Tell Us?” SSRN Paper 5267778 (May 24, 2025).
  2. 2an executive at the chain store Montgomery Ward: Russel Napier, Anatomy of the Bear, 4th edition (Hampshire, UK: Harriman House, 2016), 182.
  3. 3“Many a doctor who was overlooking his patients”: Eddie Cantor, Caught Short! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929).
  4. 4“brought misfortune to merchants and manufacturers”: Light, The Young Merchant, 159.
  5. 5typical investor spent just six minutes on research per stock trade: Toomas Laarits and Jeffry A. Wurgler, “The Research Behavior of Individual Investors,” NBER Working Paper No. w33625 (March 2025).
  6. 6only investing during Democratic or Republican presidencies: Barry Ritholtz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors that Destroy Wealth—and How to Avoid Them (Petersfield, UK: Harriman House, 2025), 312.
  7. 7“How can I help you?”: Diedre McCloskey, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
  8. 8one in three Americans changed addresses every year: Yoni Appelbaum, “How Progressives Froze the American Dream,” The Atlantic (February 10, 2025).
  9. 9“living in a van down by the river.”: Saturday Night Live, “Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker,” season 18, episode 20, featuring Chris Farley, Chistina Applegate, and David Spade (May 8, 1993), on NBC. Written by Bob Odenkirk.
  10. 1095 percent of all businesses failed: Henry Dearborn as quoted in “The Chances of Success in Mercantile Life,” Hunts Merchant Magazine XV no. V (November 1846), 475–77; Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 7–8.
  11. 11Quit rules: Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (New York: Portfolio, 2022).
Joseph S. Moore, PhD

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