Materially Social Blog Posts
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Inventing Value: Taking a realist perspective
This is the last of four extracts from the introductory chapter of my recent book Inventing Value (Cambridge UP, 2022). “The argument builds on work from a range of disciplines, most notably economic sociology, heterodox economics and political economy, and in particular on excellent recent work in the study of finance and valuation. In recent…
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Inventing Value: Financial value vs social value?
This is the third of four extracts from the introductory chapter of my recent book Inventing Value (Cambridge UP, 2022). “The explosion of financial assets over the last few decades has transformed the world’s leading economies. The finance, insurance and real estate sector now accounts for 21% of US national income – double its level in…
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Inventing Value: financial value in practice
This is the second of four posts composed of extracts from the introductory chapter of my recent book Inventing Value (Cambridge UP, 2022). “The second, more empirically oriented, part of this book is about these processes in which finance sector actors influence asset valuations. It discusses how asset circles are constructed and how their members…
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Inventing Value: theories of value
This is the first of four posts composed of extracts from the introductory chapter of my recent book Inventing Value (Cambridge UP, 2022). “The first step we must take in this journey is to confront the contentious concept of value itself. Existing understandings of economic value are dominated by two traditions of economic thought. On…
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A history of Bitcoin – told through the five different groups who bought it
Commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin buyers, writing them off as naive victims of a fraudulent bubble. But if we look more carefully, we can trace the history of Bitcoin through five key narratives. Each has drawn in a different group of buyers and in doing so contributed to its long-term growth in value.
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Bourdieu, art and financial value
Pierre Bourdieu’s work on symbolic value in the field of cultural production is surprisingly useful as a model for explaining the value of financial assets. As my recent posts have argued, financial value depends on symbolic narratives that claim certain qualities for the assets concerned and seek to associate them with particular theories of value. Bourdieu’s…
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Conventions and the value of financial assets
For mainstream economists, the prices of financial assets like shares and derivatives are determined by objective assessments of the future revenue streams that the holder of the asset is entitled to. But it is far more plausible to see them as the outcome of interactions between a variety of different financial valuation conventions, or lay…
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Towards a new theory of value
Different people may assess the value of a thing differently, but to reach agreement on values, they need to offer explanations of those assessments in terms that other people can find reasonable. Usually this means that they will need to invoke socially acceptable standards of value to justify their assessments. I call these standards lay theories…
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What is value?
Economics needs a theory of value, but the existing theories are thoroughly inadequate. In this post I briefly introduce the key elements of an alternative theory.
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Moral realism and explanatory critique
Roy Bhaskar explicitly identified himself as a moral realist, and offered several different justifications for this in the course of his work. Some critical realists accept all of those justifications, some are ambivalent or selective about which they accept, and others like Andrew Sayer and myself, for example, reject moral realism outright. This post focuses on…