The Price of Misfortune

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"Daniel Platt's intriguing book details how American culture engaged the moral implications of debt from the Gilded Age to the New Deal era. Debt was once an unequivocal marker of failure and untrustworthiness, and those who carried debt were seen as spendthrifts, unable to control their finances or themselves. Yet later, debt became a marker of the responsible capitalist: evidence of mutual relations and responsibilities in the marketplace and the community. Platt shows that these characterizations of the moral qualities of debt and the debtor were often weaponized in support of racism, classism, sexism, and other kinds of discrimination"--