Modern Economic Tendencies, by Sidney A. Reeve

I get up in the morning -- this morning, around 1:30 -- turn the computer on, and see where it takes me. I always find something to write about. Lately, the topics are bigger than I can satisfyingly write in a day. A lot of that writing is left unfinished, forgotten when the next morning comes.

So it goes.

This morning I was going to resume yesterday's efforts on financialization as the latest stage in the evolution of finance. But then I thought Oh, you know, let's see the ngrams. 

Apparently nothing until the 1980s. Skyrocket since the early 2000s. I clicked the link to view the associated Google-books and picked the "full view" option. It didn't take long, and I was off to the races again.

Modern Economic Tendencies by Sidney A. Reeve. Copyright 1921 by E.P. Dutton & Co.

The Expansion of Financialization. -- Indeed, the birth and growth of this practice, with its variations, has so revolutionalized our national methods of organizing industry, during the last quarter-century, that a business man of 1890 would find himself at sea to-day. The whole aspect of our more prominent engineering houses has been transformed, to meet this modern condition, from that of shops or designing-offices pure and simple into concerns more or less completely financial in character and function...

I read a little more, then jumped to the start of the book. The Preface opens with these words:

In a work portraying economic evolution from a time generations in the past down to the latest practicable moment ...

Economic evolution. I have to read more.

 

From the Preface:

In essential, the structure of the book remains that of a history of American economic evolution from early in the nineteenth century down to the entrance of this country into the Great War of 1914. As to the huge economic changes wrought by the war itself, then not only unfinished but regarded by many as hanging precariously in balance, barely an attempt at their inclusion has been made. The still more significant changes which have occurred since the armistice of November, 1918, are represented only as sheer predictions ...

So far as these latest changes have proceeded they corroborate not only the predictions made in the book, but the principle on which those predictions were made, namely, history's repetition of itself. The results of the Great War in matters economic have been a close parallel with those resultant from the Civil War, and from the Spanish War of 1898, except that all scales of magnitude have been increased. But, just as those basic economic tendencies which this book reveals as having proceeded steadily ever since long before the Civil War, and continued down to the latest moment, with a scarcely perceptible waver in deference to either that war or the war of 1898 -- with acceleration, indeed, by each of those wars -- so it is only natural to remark now how slightly this path of social evolution has been altered by even the Great War of 1914, except in its acceleration thereby.

 

And briefly, from Chapter X: Interest and Dividends

There is no other topic of such supreme import to modern society as the nature of interest. There is no other one feature of the social organism which handles anything like the current volume of wealth as this, nor which guides toward happiness or unhappiness so many lives.
...
For the present, the minor differences between interest on bonds, commercial paper or personal loans, as contrasted with dividends on stock, will be overlooked. The same remark applies to some so-called profits, which include wrongly sums which are in reality interest. Whatever the name, the essential character of interest is that it is money paid by the Ultimate Consumer (and not by the borrower) ...

"The essential character of interest is that it is money paid by the Ultimate Consumer" -- Sidney A. Reeve