Archive for October 10th, 2008

Apropos of an earlier post here noting this startling statistic, via Harper’s — “Percentage of U.S. homeowners who reported last year that they had bought a car using a home-equity loan: 27” — I was interested in Katherine Kersten’s comments here about the origins of consumer debt:

“In 1909, Henry Ford created the Model T, offering mobility, convenience and liberation beyond Americans’ wildest dreams. Everybody wanted one. But even after production improvements brought the price down, the Model T cost $345 — a budget-breaker for most Americans.

Ford had manufactured, for the first time, “a mass-produced consumer’s item that cost between 10 and 20 percent of a family’s annual income,” writes historian Daniel Boorstin in “The Americans: The Democratic Experience.”

“Ford was a staunch advocate of frugality and prudence. He maintained that folks should scrimp and save until they had enough cash to buy a car. But other business operators had bolder, if not better, ideas. They quickly concocted the consumer “installment plan” — a form of financing previously used only to purchase real estate.

In 1923, U.S. manufacturers sold more than 3.5 million passenger cars, according to Boorstin. About 80 percent were purchased on some kind of time-payment plan.

Installment plans spread quickly in the decades that followed, enabling Americans to acquire desirable items from refrigerators to power boats.”

First Class: The Meeting…and at First Meeting Loved. Abraham Solomon, 1854.

If I can go multi-modal for a moment, I’ve got a piece in the current Metropolis (here or text after the jump) that looks at a new show at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum, Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830–1960, in the context of the current state of rail.

Here’s a transpo teaser:

“One of the reasons rail travel can feel outdated is that journey times are often of the last century—or worse. The Brattleboro Reformer notes that in 1938 one could travel the Connecticut Yankee (one of a number of options) from Brattleboro, Vermont, to New York in four hours and 42 minutes. Today, there’s only one train, and it takes around six hours—when it’s on schedule, which about 75 percent of the time it’s not.”
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