1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910466274403321

Autore

McCarthy Michael A.

Titolo

Dismantling Solidarity : Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal / / Michael A. McCarthy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, NY : , : Cornell University Press, , [2017]

©2017

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (238 pages) : illustrations, graphs

Disciplina

331.25/20973

Soggetti

Pensions - Political aspects - United States

Pensions - Economic aspects - United States

Pension trusts - United States

Industrial relations - United States - History

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1. The Retirement Puzzle -- 2. Capitalist Crisis and Pension Insecurity -- 3. Reconversion and the Origin of Bargained Plans -- 4. Turning Labor into Finance Capital -- 5. Toward the 401(k) Ownership Society -- 6. Conclusions -- Notes -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II, private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market, and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier 401(k) retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, Dismantling Solidarity mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of



America's private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. McCarthy weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, McCarthy turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. Dismantling Solidarity is both theoretically and historically detailed and superbly argued, urging the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking. It will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, historians, and those curious about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.