The Cost of Living in America

Thomas Stapleford received his Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in 2003, where he studied the history of the social sciences. His dissertation, the basis for this book, won the Joseph Dorfman Best Dissertation Award from the History of Economics Society in 2004. Stapleford is currently an assistant professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008–2009. He has published related work in the Journal of American History, Labor History, and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas. Research for this book was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Notre Dame Faculty Research Program, and the Harvard Center for American Political Studies.

'What could be more objective than collecting cost-of-living statistics? Stapleford masterfully shows that the process of determining what it cost to live in America was actually deeply political and contested over the course of the twentieth century. Who was doing the counting, with what measures, and to what ends made all the difference. More broadly, this is a fascinating and important case study of the political uses of social science research.' Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

• Introduction; Note on terminology and technical theory; Part I. Statistics and Labor Reform,1880–1930: 1. Before there were indexes: the 'labor question' and labor statistics, 1884–1910; 2. The cost-of-living statistics and industrial relations in the 1920s; Part II. Rationalizing the Democratic Political Order, 1930–1960: 4. The nature of a revolution: the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the bottom-up: union research on the cost of living; 7. Bounded conflict: collective bargaining and the consumer price index in the Cold War; Part III. The Consumer Price Index and the Federal Government, 1960–2000: 8. Accounting for growth: macroeconomics analysis and the transformation of price index theory; 9. From workers to the welfare state: the consumer price index and the rise of indexation; Epilogue: governance and economic statistics; Technical index: a brief primer on cost-of-living indexes.