Acknowledgments
When the financial crisis first really hit in the summer and fall of 2008, I became obsessed with what was going on. It was like a giant train wreck happening. No one seemed to have predicted it or had a handle on it.
It was clear that the main government officials were scrambling to make sense of what was going on as events were overtaking their actions. I know I was not the only one who was riveted by these events. I had conversations with many people who, like me, were stunned as every day the crisis unfolded in unexpected and devastating ways. Its size, breadth, and rapidity were overwhelming.I was teaching an undergraduate class on economy and society at the time. It was impossible not to bring to class everyday materials from the newspapers and talk about what was going on and what they meant. I first of all thank that class for providing me with the opportunity to follow the facts, talk about them, and begin to grapple with them myself. Subsequent iterations of that class have found me developing many of the materials that appear in this book. Many classes of undergraduate students never realized the important part they played as guinea pigs in my figuring out what happened and working to present it to a smart but not necessarily informed audience. As such, my goal is to write a book that is not only technically interesting to scholars and specialists but also accessible to educated readers. I have in mind those undergraduates who after listening to me lecture on these materials for five weeks or so showed a remarkable grasp of what happened. I hope that I can reproduce that understanding in this book.
I had the great fortune to have a number of amazing graduate students who were interested in the crisis and worked with me on various parts of this project. I would like to especially thank Adam Goldstein, who began to work as a research assistant with me on the topic.
From the beginning, Adam was more a coauthor than a research assistant. He amazed me with his insight, his ability to find data, and his deep grasp of the industry. We worked through lots of this stuff together and collaborated on the papers that are the basis of this book. Jacob Habinek also worked on parts of this project. He has made substantial contributions, particularly to understanding how the crisis spread from America to Europe. Alex Roehrkasse worked with me as a research assistant and coauthor on a paper that is part of Chapter 7. Jonah Stuart Brundage and Michael Schultz worked with me as research assistants and coauthors on how the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee viewed mortgage securitization and the housing market from 2001 to 2008. Finally, Nataliya Nedzhetskaya went through the manuscript to prepare it for review and Emily Ruppel prepared the index.Chapter 7 builds on ideas first discussed in “The Causes of Fraud in the Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2009: Evidence from the Mortgage-Backed Securities Industry,” American Sociological Review 88, no. 4 (2016): 617-643. Portions of Chapter 8 were first published as “Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 879-909.
Over the years, I have gotten great feedback from a variety of audiences who listened to various versions of these chapters. They are sufficiently numerous, and this has been going on for such a long time that I am embarrassed to try to reconstruct them. I thank everyone. Over the years, I have had many great conversations with many people about the topic of this book. I would like to thank a few of them: Bruce Carruthers, Frank Dobbin, Marion Fourcade, Mike Lounsbury, Donald MacKenzie, Sarah Quinn, Akos Rona-Tas, Marc Schneiberg, Richard Swedberg, and John Williams. I got great feedback from two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript. They helped shape the final version of this to make it more coherent as well as, hopefully, more accurate. I would like to thank James Brandt, my editor at Harvard Press. He offered many useful suggestions in making this book more readable and coherent. I would also like to thank Eric Mulder, Design Specialist at Harvard University Press, for his help in producing the figures and graphs in the book.
Finally, I would like to thank Heather, who has been with me throughout my obsession with the financial crisis. She has asked me good questions, humored me, and gotten me to occasionally forget that I was doing any of this. This book is dedicated to her.