{"title":"The moral accounting of debts: productivity, deservingness and the consensual creation of Chapter XIII bankruptcy","authors":"Nicholas A Pang","doi":"10.1093/ser/mwae047","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Chapter XIII’s wage-earner payment plans are now the default form of personal bankruptcy in the USA. During the Great Depression, it was created as a voluntary choice and enacted with unanimous legislative support. Absent conflict between creditors and labor and social reformers, legislators agreed that Chapter XIII was for the benefit of both honorable insolvents and their fair creditors. How did wage-earner payment plans emerge out of a consensual legislative process? Employing a computational abductive approach on a wide range of legislative, media and bankruptcy records, I show that Chapter XIII’s creation was facilitated by a ‘moral accounting’ that, based on their race and gender identities, positively evaluated most White men bankruptcy petitioners as ‘deserving’, even as it recognized occupational variations in their economic ‘productivity’. This study highlights how racial discourses of ‘deservingness’ are central to the construction of credit markets as part of America’s submerged welfare state.","PeriodicalId":47947,"journal":{"name":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Socio-Economic Review","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae047","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Chapter XIII’s wage-earner payment plans are now the default form of personal bankruptcy in the USA. During the Great Depression, it was created as a voluntary choice and enacted with unanimous legislative support. Absent conflict between creditors and labor and social reformers, legislators agreed that Chapter XIII was for the benefit of both honorable insolvents and their fair creditors. How did wage-earner payment plans emerge out of a consensual legislative process? Employing a computational abductive approach on a wide range of legislative, media and bankruptcy records, I show that Chapter XIII’s creation was facilitated by a ‘moral accounting’ that, based on their race and gender identities, positively evaluated most White men bankruptcy petitioners as ‘deserving’, even as it recognized occupational variations in their economic ‘productivity’. This study highlights how racial discourses of ‘deservingness’ are central to the construction of credit markets as part of America’s submerged welfare state.
期刊介绍：
Originating in the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), Socio-Economic Review (SER) is part of a broader movement in the social sciences for the rediscovery of the socio-political foundations of the economy. Devoted to the advancement of socio-economics, it deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection between economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. They also consider how the economy in turn affects the society of which it is part, for example by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The domain of the journal is deliberately broadly conceived, so new variations to its general theme may be discovered and editors can learn from the papers that readers submit. To enhance international dialogue, Socio-Economic Review accepts the submission of translated articles that are simultaneously published in a language other than English. In pursuit of its program, SER is eager to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, economics, political science and moral philosophy, through both empirical and theoretical work. Empirical papers may be qualitative as well as quantitative, and theoretical papers will not be confined to deductive model-building. Papers suggestive of more generalizable insights into the economy as a domain of social action will be preferred over narrowly specialized work. While firmly committed to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, Socio-Economic Review encourages discussion of the practical and ethical dimensions of economic action, with the intention to contribute to both the advancement of social science and the building of a good economy in a good society.
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