The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

demarcates the relatively well off from the poor is associated with Hans Rosling. See “The Magic Washing Machine,” TED, https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing _machine (accessed September 27, 2018).

292. Lebergott (1993, p. 130).

293. Gordon (2016, pp. 108–10).

294. Lebergott (1993, p. 113).

295. Barr (2016, chapter 9). “Robert J. Gordon has noted that more skyscrapers higher than

250 feet tall were built in New York between 1922 and 1931 than in any ten-year period before or since” (Field 2014, p. 51; no citation to Gordon provided by Field).

296. This very much included African Americans, who benefited from the anonymity of mail order in an era during which they were discriminated against in face-to-face transactions. Lauretta Charlton, “Back When Sears Made Black Customers a Priority,” New York Times, Oc- tober 20, 2018.

297. The 1905 Sears catalog described it this way. “Miles of railroad tracks run lengthwise through, in and around this building for the receiving, moving and forwarding of merchandise;

Notes to Chapter 5 597

elevators, mechanical conveyors, endless chains, moving sidewalks, gravity chutes, apparatus and conveyors, pneumatic tubes and every known mechanical appliance for reducing labor, for the working out of economy and dispatch is to be utilized here in our great Works” (Emmet and Jeuck 1950, p. 132).

298. Raff and Temin (1999).

299. Levinson (2011).

300. Kim (2001). A brand name is an intangible asset whose value depends on the good will

of customers. It is hostage capital in the sense that its value is thus dependent on keeping cus- tomers happy.

301. Levinson (2011, p. 94).

302. Levinson (2011, pp. 107 and 110).

303. Levinson (2011, p. 113). $1 billion, about $14 billion in 2017 dollars, was roughly 1 percent

of GDP. To put that in some perspective, multiple sources give Amazon’s 2017 revenue as $178 billion, about 0.9 percent of GDP.

304. Dumenil (1995, p. 72).

305. Lippmann (1929, p. 62).

306. Lewis (1922, p. 52).

307. Lewis (1922, p. 100).

308. Although they were a generation apart in age, Lewis and Veblen were well aware of each

other’s work and often riffed on each other in print. Some scholars have seen Lewis’s contribu- tion largely as having popularized Veblen for the generation of the 1920s (Eby 1993, pp. 5–6).

309. Yet Doane cannot hide a grudging suspicion that standardized American cities might be more dynamic and ultimately more pleasant places to live than the textured and idiosyncratic cities of Europe. His interlocutor, the European-born scientist Yavitch, probably also a voice of Lewis, quickly disabuses him of the idea. “‘You,’ said Dr. Yavitch, ‘are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want—and what I want now is a drink’” (Lewis 1922, p. 101).

310. Skidelsky (1994, p. 240).

311. Lippmann (1929, p. 51); Schumpeter (1950). In Schumpeter’s account, of course, the norms being etched away were not in fact bourgeois in character: they were premodern residues that served to protect bourgeois society. By contrast, as we will see, Keynes became obsessed with overthrowing a Victorian norm that was very much bourgeois: thrift.

312. Commager and Nevins (1976); Morison (1965); Schlesinger (1957). See also Hicks (1960).

313. Shlaes (2013); Silver (1982); Sobel (1998).

314. Scheiber (1960, p. 35). Ironically, perhaps, Hays became better known as the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America who enforced the famous “Hays Code” of self-censorship on the movie industry. The code had in fact been devised by the American Catholic Church, and the MPPDA embraced it as a way of eluding not only threatened federal censorship but also actual government censorship at the state and local level (Black 1996).

315. Sobel (1998, p. 221).

316. Sobel (1998, p. 250).

317. Hawley (1979, p. 72). 318. Weinstein (1968, p. 230).

598 Notes to Chapter 6

319. Brownlee (2016, p. 113); Cannadine (2006, p. 281).

320. Brownlee (2016, pp. 100–108).

321. “Just as labor cannot be forced to work against its will, so it can be taken for granted that

capital will not work unless the return is worth while. It will continue to retire into the shelter of tax-exempt bonds, which offer both security and immunity from the tax collector” (Mellon 1924, p. 79).

322. Sobel (1998, p. 311). For inflation conversion see Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2022, https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ (accessed August 17, 2022).

323. Kennedy (1980, p. 112).

324. Desai, Dharmapala, and Fung (2007).

325. Means (1930, p. 586).

326. Means (1930, p. 572).

327. Lipartito and Morii (2010, pp. 1056–57).

328. Ott (2011, pp. 156–57).

329. Even after the Depression destroyed many family empires, only 30 percent or so of the