The emergence of popular personal finance magazines and the risk shift in American society

Abstract

This study considers the emergence of personal finance magazines in the US after the Second World War. It examines an instance when a possible relationship existed between a media genre’s emergence and shifts in the general political economy. It suggests that the appearance of the personal finance genre was related to the shift in the American political economy from corporate liberalism to neoliberalism. Specifically, it focuses on the hailing patterns evident in personal finance magazines’ editorial statements, and finds that these patterns attempt to constitute a popular and heterogeneous investing public of independent individuals in which magazines supplant other agents as sources of advice.