In this essay I propose a category of ‘human economies’ to refer to those where the primary focus of economic life is on reconfiguring relations between people, rather than the allocation of commodities. Currencies that used to be labelled ‘primitive money’, but which are primarily used to effect this, would better be called ‘social currencies’.
Articles
Articles and publications
On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics
Last week, Robert F. Murphy published a piece on the webpage of the Von Mises Institute responding to some points I made in a recent interview on Naked Capitalism, where I mentioned that the standard economic accounts of the emergence of money from barter appears to be wildly wrong.
On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations
For all the vast literature on “the gift,” the concept is surprisingly under-theorized. This is because everyone assumes that there is something called “the gift”, that all transactions not involving payment or the promise of payment are the same thing.
On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture
What follows is an essay of interpretation. It is about direct action in North America, about the mass mobilizations organized by the so called “anti-globalization movement”, and especially, about the war of images that has surrounded it. It begins with a simple observation.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this.
Painful memories
In this essay I would like to talk about people who lost everything. Imerina (the traditional name for the northern half of the central plateau of Madagascar) is a place where people attach enormous importance to the memory of their ancestors and the lands on which their ancestors once lived.
Punching the Clock
Harper’s Magazine
Rebel Without a God
David: “This is it! The very first academic essay ever written about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, that’s right, I founded Buffy Studies. (Never read any of it though or was invited to any of their silly conferences. But you know something? That’s okay.)”
Roy Bhaskar obituary
Roy Bhaskar, who has died aged 70 of heart failure, turned to philosophy only after becoming an economics lecturer at Oxford University in the late 1960s. Feeling that economic science had virtually nothing useful to say about real-world issues of global wealth and poverty, he embarked on research that led to the foundation of the philosophical school known as critical realism.
Savage capitalism is back – and it will nottame itself
Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious.