BOOK REVIEW
BY ROBERT E. WRIGHT
Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy By Devin Kennedy Columbia University Press( 2026) 320 Pages $ 30.00
When it comes to computers and finance, history does not just rhyme or repeat, it compounds. So a history concerning the automation of financial firms and markets can simultaneously spur both great optimism and pessimism. In Coding Capitalism, Devin Kennedy, an acolyte of the New History of Capitalism, pursues the pessimistic path. Readers, however, can set aside his snide asides about America’ s postwar economic system and attend instead to what his evidence shows. Read that way, the book might as well be called Capitalizing Code, the story of how businesses and governments turned the code that runs computers into valuable assets.
Foremost, the evidence shows unequivocally that the current Sturm und Drang directed against AI and datacenters originated in the postwar period, if not earlier. Almost every fear circulating today— from fear of job loss to computer-caused market implosion— found expression in the 1950s,’ 60s and’ 70s and often grew from concerns about even older, pre-electronic forms of calculation, data storage and artificial biological intelligences( domesticates, like dogs). The stakes today, though, have achieved gargantuan proportions because AI models can spread globally almost instantaneously and annually grow exponentially more powerful. Current frontier models make the original Chat- GPT from just a few years ago look like an abacus and have even begun to improve themselves without human input.
Second, competition drove businesses and governments alike to find cheaper and better ways to gather, store, analyze and share data on the shop floor, the trading floor and the killing floor. Neither sector led as improvement ran through feedback loops among many actors. For example, commercial networks came first: American Airlines’ SABRE, Quotron and Teleregister’ s Telequote were already moving data over lines leased from Western Union and AT & T when ARPANET carried its first packets in 1969. Government did not invent the internet so much as improve on the privately owned one that had formed in the Victorian era and that found new life in the early postwar decades as companies began to sell their mainframes’ excess capacity to others.
Similarly, supply-side and demand-side factors often fed each other in rapid succession. Kennedy cites Bucknell Professor Janice M. Traflet’ s work to the effect that the NYSE coaxed individual stockholders back into the market after the war. That spurred higher trading volumes, which helped institutional investors to achieve scale economies. The ensuing paperwork crisis of 1968 necessitated a move away from paper, pneumatic tubes and light signals to computerized trade tracking and, eventually, electronic market making, starting with NASDAQ( 1971) and large block trade communication and execution systems like Instinet and AutEx.
The SEC pushed for more automation, too, hoping it would help regulators discover tainted trades. Focused on tradeoffs between security and freedom, monopolization / cartelization and competition, and know-your-counterparty rules and anonymity, the debates around securities trading centralization in the 1960s and’ 70s mirror those over central bank digital currencies today.
Technological advances ameliorated the paperwork crisis and created the political pressure needed for the brokerage commission deregulation of“ May Day” 1975. Thereafter, brokerages competed on both the price and quality of their services, which drove yet more automation, especially as the personal computer revolution took hold. More use of interviews and memoirs could have enlivened the book here and enlightened the author’ s views on May Day and other automation and regulatory matters. Joe Ricketts’ 2019 book, The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur’ s Memoir, for example, could have provided numerous interesting examples of the larger trends that Kennedy describes in staid, general terms.
As befits a scholarly monograph published by a university press, the book’ s tone is usually serious. Humor occasionally seeps through, though, as with Barry Boehm’ s 1975 quip that“ to make all the errors a modern computer can make in 10 seconds, it would take a team of 30 accountants working full-time for 50 years.” Several science fiction computer stories, like Isaac Asimov’ s“ Alexander: The Automated Conqueror,” first published in Wall Street Computer Review( January 1984) and retitled in anthologies to“ Alexander the God,” also make welcome, relevant appearances.
Clearly, Kennedy understands computers better than capital markets, but the book ably introduces, or for some older readers spurs nostalgia for,“ compunication”( telecom) equipment like Bunker- Ramo Telequote terminals and the Quotron and Ultronic Stockmaster ticker tape replacement systems. Lightly but effectively illustrated, the book often vividly describes the technologies it does not formally picture, down to how they were arranged on some traders’ desks.
The 1980s, Kennedy shows, brought marked improvements in computer reliability. Securities markets began to operate non-stop, thanks to the replacement
38 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2026 | www. MoAF. org