Preface ix
Introduction: The Lives behind Economic Lives 1
Part one: Valuation of Human Lives
Introduction 13
Chapter 1: Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in Nineteenth-Century America 19
Chapter 2: The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children's Insurance in the United States 40
Chapter 3: From Baby Farms to Baby M 61
Chapter 4: The Priceless Child Revisited 72
Part Two: The Social Meaning of Money Introduction 89
Chapter 5: The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies" 93
Chapter 6: Fine Tuning the Zelizer View 128
Chapter 7: Payments and Social Ties 136
Chapter 8: Money, Power, and Sex 150
Part Three: Intimate Economies
Introduction 165
Chapter 9: Do Markets Poison Intimacy? 171
Chapter 10: The Purchase of Intimacy 181
Chapter 11: Kids and Commerce 213
Chapter 12: Intimacy in Economic Organizations 237
Part Four: The Economy of Care
Introduction 269
Chapter 13: Caring Everywhere 275
Chapter 14: Risky Exchanges 288
Part Five: Circuits of Commerce
Introduction 303
Chapter 15: Circuits within Capitalism 311
Chapter 16: Circuits in Economic Life 344
Part Six: Appraising Ec onomic Lives: Critiques and Syntheses
Introduction 355
Chapter 17: Beyond the Polemics on the Market: Establishing a Theoretical and Empirical Agenda 363
Chapter 18: Pasts and Futures of Economic Sociology 383
Chapter 19: Culture and Consumption 398
Chapter 20: Ethics in the Economy 440
Published Works of Viviana A. Zelizer on Economic Sociology 459
Index 465

Revealing the human side of economic life
Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. Economic Lives synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time.
Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity-as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises.
Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, Economic Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.

Viviana A. Zelizer is the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is the author of The Purchase of Intimacy, The Social Meaning of Money, Pricing the Priceless Child (all Princeton), and Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States.