Search

Much of what passes as economic knowledge is metaphorical in nature. This study focuses in particular on the meteorological origins of economic metaphors. Once markets became imagined in terms of atmospheric phenomena, economists and financial services providers began to construct instruments, especially forecasting models, which resembled those used in meteorology. These tools allowed them to better mimic their own metaphors. Forecasting-oriented indicators, so-called ‘barometers’, contributed to making the economy readable. Their paradoxical impact, however, was that they also created a concept of economy that offered only one type of future, namely unpredictability. This shows that economic metaphors are ambiguous, and they contribute to conceptualizations of economy that are not fully determined by economics.

In the economists’ old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state ofhuman knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolutionary mal-adaptations. However, it’s just, as is often the case, that there is also a historically specific story about local culture to be told about ignorance. This paper will report back from field-work conducted with contemporary, computerized stock traders, develop a typology of the things they say they don’t know, and then suggest what this has to do with some of the more durable features and behaviours of contemporary financial markets.

Neoliberalism is usually associated with pro-market values. This paper argues that more attention should be paid to the specific forms of market criticisms that unfold in neoliberal settings. We adapt Foucault's and Callon's notion of problematization to study recent policy reforms in Chile. The analysis shows a transition from a set of policies justified in terms of the virtues of the market to policy interventions based on a comparison between the situation in the specific area and ideal well-functioning markets. This transition, we propose, signals a particular mode of governing with its characteristic cognitive operation (areas of collective concerns are assessed in terms of market failures), apparatus (policy instruments oriented to remediate market failures), and the jurisdiction of a particular type of experts.

This paper identifies and elucidates what it calls the Malthus Effect from two perspectives: a genealogical-theoretical one and an empirical-diagnostic one. The first concerns its implications for Michel Foucault's genealogy and conceptions of modern governmentality. The second suggests that Malthusian concerns have an enduring presence in recent and contemporary politics. In them we find a government of life that tethers the question of poverty to that of population, as both a national and international concern, links biopolitics to questions of national security and is a key source of the modern environmental movement. It remains present in areas such as welfare reform and immigration policy, notions of sustainability and in the global public health and environmental movements. It takes the form of a genopolitics, a politics of the reproductive capacity of human populations and the human species.

The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a ‘natural-cultural reality’ resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with different intellectual pathways. We propose to bring these conceptual innovations together to understand contemporary problems of the government of life, that is, of managing, controlling and optimizing a living population. In this domain, the natural/biological continues to intersect with the social/cultural in novel and unexpected ways. Straddling the specter of biopolitics, we examine four dimensions of the concept: vital threats and the resurrection of death power, the interplay of sovereignty, discipline and security, governmentalization through medical normalization, and ‘securitization’ of life as circulations and open series. The article also introduces this special feature on the government of life in which significant scholars explores issues of population management by drawing upon, debating, and developing the conceptual heritage of Foucault.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of crowds in the financial market by examining the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of contrarian investment philosophy. Developed in non-scientific, practice-oriented ‘how to’ handbooks in 1920s and 1930s America, contrarian investment advice was aimed at so-called small investors rather than well-established market practitioners. Emerging out of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about public participation in the stock market, the contrarians expanded on a widely held (amongst financial writers) scepticism about the investment and speculation skills (or lack thereof) of the masses and adopted ideas from the theoretical discipline of crowd psychology, whereby they positioned the mass (i.e. the crowd) in opposition to the successful investor. I argue that despite its idiosyncrasies, the contrarians’ conception of the market based on crowd psychology points to a fundamental fragility of market participants, which still lingers on in recent debates about the wisdom of financial market crowds.

Jakob Vestergaard has produced one of the most telling analyses of the international financial architecture by deploying a broadly Foucauldian framework that invokes a novel description of neo-liberal governance, one organized around discipline, conditional exceptions and the pursuit of a ‘proper economy’. This review both welcomes but challenges some of Vestergaard's analysis. In so doing it explores further the paradoxes of liberalism and the fate of sovereignty in the current international context.

Are regional trade agreements (RTAs) carefully crafted projects that systematically advance their member states’ interests or do they instead generate outcomes that frustrate those interests? Works on the most prominent RTA – the European Union – have traditionally been split over this question. New research on international organizations parallels that literature. Combining rational choice and historical institutionalism, this article makes a middle-ground case: the limited rationality of national representatives and the complexity of RTAs ensure both the advancement and frustration of national interests. The focus is on shifting national preferences, the unpredictable implications of decisions over time and the pursuit of short-term gains to the benefit of some constituents but not others. Evidence from NAFTA and Mercosur supports these claims while highlighting, in line with recent scholarship, the need to include politics in institutionalist accounts of integration. The conclusion reflects on...

Despite the resilience of national institutions and practices there are increasing signs that national systems of corporate governance are giving way to an idealized American model of shareholder activism and liquid equity markets. These pressures are ideologically backed by 'shareholderism', which consists of three claims: a prudential, a functional and a moral claim. The prudential one claims superior efficiency for shareholder control and market allocation of capital. The functional one bases its claim for shareholder control on the contribution of risk-carrying capital. The moral one is based on a liberal doctrine of ownership that grounds exclusive control rights in title-holders. This paper addresses the functional and moral claims. It argues that public equity markets do not contribute capital and that the Lockean conception of property is both untenable and morally reprehensible. Instead corporate democracy is proposed as a way to accommodate the conflicting claims of stakeholders. To do so an int...