Greta Krippner is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in economic sociology, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social theory. Her work explores how the rise of the market has intersected wider social, cultural, and political transformations in U.S. society in the “long” twentieth century. Her first book, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2011), examined the financialization of the U.S. economy in the period since the 1970s, arguing that the turn to finance was an inadvertent response to unresolved distributional dilemmas as post-war growth stalled. Her current book project traces the evolution of methods of risk-based pricing over the course of the twentieth century, asking how the notion that each individual should “pay the cost” of her own riskiness emerged as a widely accepted normative principle governing how risk is distributed in contemporary society.
