Nic Johnson

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences, Law, Letters, and Society, University of Chicago (department page)

Education:

  • Ph.D. in History, University of Chicago
  • M.A. in Economics, Johns Hopkins University
  • B.A. in Math, University of Minnesota

Research:

Teaching Experience:

  • Courses Taught
    • History of central banking
    • Twentieth Century Theories of Capitalism
    • BA Senior Thesis Seminar in Law, Letters Society
    • Power, Identity, Resistance
    • History of Economics
    • The Marginal Revolution
  • Teaching Assistant
    • Early Modern World Economic History
    • Elements of Microeconomics
    • Economics of Discrimination
    • Macroeconomic Theory I (graduate)

Awards and Scholarships:

  • Visiting Scholar, Center for the History of Political Economy, Duke University, 2022-3
  • Shapiro Fellowship at the University of Chicago
  • T. Rowe Price Fellowship at Johns Hopkins

Book Reviews:

  • Book Review (forthcoming), H-Diplo, of Aditi Sahasrabuddhe, Bankers’ Trust
  • “What the Thunder Said,” New Left Review, of Melinda Cooper, Counterrevolution
  • Book Review, Business History Review, of Thomas Moser and Marcel Savioz (eds.), Karl Brunner and Monetarism
  • “Embarrassment of Riches“, New Left Review, of Guido Alfani, As Gods Among Men
  • “After Free Trade,” Boston Review, of Eric Helleiner, The Neomercantilists
  • “In the Common Interest,” Boston Review, of Ariel Ron, Grassroots Leviathan
  • Roundtable on Destin Jenkins’ Bonds of Inequality, Jain Family Institute

Popular:

About Me

My research focuses on the history of attempts to stabilize the capitalist business cycle, and the various constraints – political, social, intellectual, economic – that have prevented them from fully functioning. Reflecting my multidisciplinary background, I draw on and make contributions to the subfields of intellectual history, political economy, economic history, and historical sociology, using both archival and quantitative research methods.

This agenda divides between three projects. The first is my dissertation, which I am currently transforming into a book manuscript. It traces the evolution of American Keynesianism in the second half of the twentieth century. Both intellectually and in terms of pragmatic policymaking, there is a shift from an early focus on fiscal policy, driven by military spending in Korea and Vietnam, towards monetary and financial policies at the Federal Reserve and IMF at the end of the century.

The second is a book project about the long history of interest rates on sovereign debt. It frames the recent experiences with near-zero interest rates as the culmination of many centuries of capitalist development. I have already published an article-length version of this argument and am working on expanding it into a manuscript.

The third and final project fell out of my dissertation, as a long chapter that did not quite fit. It is an archival history of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the largest corporation in the world in the 1930s and 1940s. Three out of five chapters of this book are already done. In my view, the RFC represents a lost alternative to both the fiscal-military and the monetary-financial methods for managing capitalist stabilization that dominated the postwar era. Understanding how it worked and why it disappeared will contribute to contemporary debates about so-called “post-neo-liberal” policymaking, made more urgent by the limits to monetary policy at the zero lower bound.

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