The Economization of Life - Softcover

Murphy, M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822363453 ISBN 13: 9780822363453

Verlag: MNG University Presses, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, M. Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized "Invest in a Girl" campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. Murphy is Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Heath, and Technoscience and Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, both also published by Duke University Press.

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The Economization of Life

By Michelle Murphy

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6345-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Bottles and Curves, 
ARC I | PHANTASMAGRAMS OF POPULATION AND ECONOMY, 
01 Economy as Atmosphere, 
02 Demographic Transitions, 
03 Averted Birth, 
04 Dreaming Technoscience, 
ARC II | REPRODUCING INFRASTRUCTURES, 
05 Infrastructures of Counting and Affect, 
06 Continuous Incitement, 
07 Experimental Exuberance, 
08 Dying, Not Dying, Not Being Born, 
09 Experimental Otherwise, 
ARC III | INVESTABLE LIFE, 
10 Invest in a Girl, 
11 Exhausting Data, 
12 Unaligned Feeling, 
Coda: Distributed Reproduction, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

ECONOMY AS ATMOSPHERE

Worries over U.S. Economy Damped.

Mixed Feelings on Economy.

A Chilled Economy Feels a "Breath of Spring."

Why Does a "Healthy" Economy Feel So Bad?

A Jittery Economy Stirs Second Thoughts about Ostentation.

U.S. newspaper headlines have announced the collective sense of the national economy as a felt presence since the 1950s. The affective force of the economy manifests as hope, optimism, jitters, confidence, panic, faith, or trepidation. It is diagnosed as healthy and ailing, sluggish or irrationally exuberant. Swimming within economic tides, contemporary financiers and job seekers alike have found themselves hanging on the slightest rumor of an inside sign that might augur the economy's direction. Measures like unemployment rates, consumer confidence, and inflation all portend the economy, giving a sense of pulse and feeling for a constellation of economic activity surrounding life that one cannot hope to see in its totality. The economy becomes palpable in cryptic statements by finance ministers, a bloom of construction, or a colorful newspaper graph that can induce expectations or worries about the economy's rhythms and directions.

Given the ubiquitous force of feeling about the economy, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that "the economy," as the name for the fulsome totality of national economic activity, is an invention of the twentieth century. It was only in 1934 that the first quantitative measure of national macroeconomic output was calculated, heralding an era of econometrics that strove to explicate the dynamics and patterns that economic activities generated at the scale of the nation. Given form by quantitative models and measures, "the economy" as a noun is more than an epistemic figure. The economy became a palpable atmosphere that structured daily life, such that Americans did not need to know anything about economics, its calculations or models, in order to feel the macroeconomy as an invisible yet pressing context. By 1992, "It's the economy, stupid" was a populist slogan of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, suggesting a democratized sense of the existence of the macroeconomy. Anyone might intuitively feel the atmosphere of the economy as a determining yet diffuse presence.

John Maynard Keynes, the Cambridge economist and Bloomsbury darling, helped to bring the macroeconomy into the world in his 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, a text that catapulted him into celebrity. While European states had long tabulated the wealth of nations, the macroeconomy was not a mere counting up of wealth. Through the work of Keynes and other similarly minded macroeconomists, the national economy was explicated as a new aggregate kind, a collective blur of activity that nonetheless could be modeled as a set of predictable correlations, tendencies, forces, and rates representable in equations and graphs. When interest rates go up, investment goes down, employment drops, output falls. With equations and diagrams, mathematical modeling in the 1930s performatively discerned "the economy" as a constellation of such interrelationships within a closed system whose boundary was the nation-state. In turn, new projects were born to gather data about the economy, which then were congealed into measures (such as employment rates, inflation, aggregate output, consumer confidence, and so on) that would give symbolization to the well-being of the economy as a whole. This constellation of relations, once legible, could then be targeted by acts of governance: decrease inflation, stimulate confidence, cut taxes. State fiscal policies would seek to alter the relationships that econometrics had brought into visibility.

Moreover, the "Keynesian revolution" in economics consisted not only in the invention of the terminology, units of analysis, and framework of macroeconomics but also in the stance that markets would not naturally correct themselves, and hence the macroeconomy not only could, but should, be governed so that capitalism might maximize employment and wealth while minimizing crashes and suffering. Within the container of "the economy," fiscal policies were aimed to control inflation, bring down unemployment, or stimulate investment, and hence were designed to trigger a cascade of interrelated effects inside the economy. Keynes's work was a direct reaction to the catastrophes of death and poverty that were World War I and the Great Depression in Britain. Macroeconomics was in this sense an attempt to develop a rationale for planning for the next war, World War II. But it was also incubated during Keynes's time as a colonial bureaucrat and applied economist in London's India Office. The epistemological crafting of the macroeconomy as an atmosphere of relations that could be modeled, indexed, and governed was part of an effort to plan against poverty and prepare for war, and it was also a transference of the administrative hubris of colonial governance, which assumed a world open to interference and extraction. The macroeconomy was thus conjured, from the start, as an object to be acted on.

Through a Keynesian stance, state projects to build physical infrastructure — roads, bridges, irrigation — became a kind of fiscal policy, in which the state spent money in order to raise employment at the same time that it improved the economy's physical milieu. In so doing, Keynesian approaches argued against the automatic balancing of national budgets and instead advocated for active countercyclical fiscal policies that spent into deficit to "stimulate" the economy when it slowed. In these ways, the macroeconomy rendered capitalism as a kind of national atmosphere that needed explicating (through economics) and taking care of (through planning). Capitalism was not just made up of profit-maximizing practices within businesses and markets; through social science practices of quantification and modeling, capitalism was substantiated as a firmament of correlations, rates, and forces that surrounded life and were understood to structure conditions on the ground. Life was lived in the atmosphere of the economy.

The cloud of relationships forming the economy, moreover, was modeled as dynamic and oriented through complex looping timescapes. For Keynes, the macroeconomy was collectively shaped by the many actions that people regularly took based on their varied sense of the future, what Keynes called their "state of expectation" and "time preference." From workers to financiers to state planners, Keynes posited that everyone was acting through psychological states of expectation. While most actions were decided by a sense of short-term future, Keynes held that the results of such actions nonetheless persisted into the long term, and hence...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MNG University Presses
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822363453
• ISBN 13: 9780822363453
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande