Were Late-Nineteenth-Century, Small-Town Americans Life-Cycle Savers?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Bodenhorn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Working Class Debt in the Late Nineteenth Century United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elyce Rotella ◽  
George Alter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Life Cycle Patterns ◽  
Near Future

Children's wages played a central role in family economic strategies in the late nineteenth century. The family budgets collected by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1889-1890 show that life-cycle patterns of savings and debt varied by industry depending upon incomes from children. The consumption patterns of families whose expenditures exceeded their incomes do not show signs of economic distress, and most families whose annual budget was in deficit could expect larger contributions from children in the near future. These patterns suggest that families used borrowing and saving to smooth consumption over the life-cycle as the earning capacity of the family changed.

scholarly journals ‘What a Wonderful Change Have I Undergone…So Altered in Stature, Knowledge & Ideas!’: Apprenticeship, Adolescence and Growing Up in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ulster

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Until the late nineteenth century, apprenticeship was the main way in which young people were trained in crafts and trades. Given that most apprenticeship terms lasted approximately seven years, young people could expect to spend a large part of their youth in service to another. Apprenticeship therefore coincided with an important phase in the life cycle of many young men (and women) during this period. A study of apprenticeship not only tells us how young people learned the skills with which they made their future living, it also casts light on the process of ‘growing up’. However, we still know little about the everyday lives of apprentices, their relationships with their masters, and how young people themselves understood the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Drawing largely on the diary of John Tennent (1772–1813), a grocer’s apprentice who kept a record of his time spent in service, this article aims to broaden our understanding of these themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. It demonstrates that, for young middle-class men like Tennent, apprenticeship played a key role in the transition from boy to manhood.

What’s the Matter with Ohio? Liberal Democracy and the Challenge of Irrationality

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-353
Author(s):  
Mitchum Huehls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Small Town ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sherwood Anderson ◽  
Chantal Mouffe ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This essay mines 100 years of fiction about the irrationalities of small-town Ohio to ask whether liberal democracy can accommodate irrationality or is required, because of its double commitment to equality and liberty, to exclude it. Reading novels from Sherwood Anderson, William Gass, and Stephen Markley, I trace a trajectory from the late nineteenth century of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), when irrationality partially grounded liberal community, to the twenty-first century of Markley’s Ohio (2018), when the irrationalities of violence, addiction, racism, and abuse constitute what I call “piteous solidarity,” a form of solidarity grounded on our shared inhumanity. I conclude by speculating that such piteous solidarity might represent “the mobilization of common affects in defense of equality and social justice” that Chantal Mouffe has recently argued is necessary for constituting the “we” of a left populism.

Patterns and Determinants of Wealth Inequality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Ontario

2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-380
Author(s):  
Livio Di Matteo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Portfolio Allocation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Age Composition ◽  
Type Curve ◽  
Economic Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Allocation Decisions

This article shows that late-nineteenth-century wealth inequality was associated with rising wealth levels supporting the existence of a Kuznets-type curve, but this curve is not unconditional.The tendency of wealth inequality to vary with age means that wealth inequality was also a function of the changing age composition of the population and may have been the result of portfolio allocation decisions across the life cycle. Canada's population “aged” during the late nineteenth century, with the proportion of population under age 20 dropping from 53% in 1871 to 43% by 1911. The general aging of the population could have increased inequality in both wealth and income. These results follow recent work by Jeffrey Williamson (1998), who argues that Kuznets curves are not unconditional. In other words, as the results of this article confirm, wealth inequality is the outcome of a complex economic process, not a single determinant cause.

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