Abstract recessionism
ELLINGSON, NEIL
I recently had a conversation with a new acquaintance who works at a hedge fund. Excited by the opportunity to talk to someone on the "inside" of the crisis, I peppered him with questions,...
...Reversing this process does not require revolution, but it does call for a deep transformation: we have to make the economic system serve social needs through a politics of democratic control, rather than letting the "laws" of markets dictate our every priority...
...He added a bizarre analogy: "Basically, it's my job to predict who will be the next Oprah...
...It's pure numbers—I look for patterns and write computer programs to pick investments that resemble those patterns...
...Writing in The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi relates how throughout much of history the economy was embedded in social and political institutions...
...I wanted to know what someone working at a hedge fund actually did...
...It is now clear that we need to get back to reality...
...The irony is that these sophisticated economic video games brought real devastation when the big game was over...
...With the rise of capitalist societies, the economic sphere became an autonomous force with its own internal logic, wreaking havoc on society and the natural world...
...When we do so, we realize this crisis didn't begin in 2008...
...They make a pattern that we should require Wall Street analysts to study...
...And it's not just the masters of finance who need to be reminded of the human reality that "pure numbers" represent...
...A Marxist would say the problem is capitalism itself: with commodity fetishism and the triumph of exchange value over use value, our economic system is predicated on abstraction...
...The insecurities of unemployment, illness, poverty, and hunger aren't only jagged lines on a graph or depressing statistics reported in the daily papers—they have been experienced in living bodies...
...Numbers can be effective in rallying support for new ways of thinking about how our economy should be regulated, but we must not forget to hold our abstractions up to the light of real circumstances...
...Committed leftists, if we are to make a difference, must remember that, too...
...The question that yielded the most illuminating response was the simplest...
...Deflating my working theory of hedge fund research involving ceiling-high stacks of reports on companies, he explained that his job was mostly mathematics...
...I look at Oprah's demographic profile and bet on all the little girls that have similar profiles...
...Envisioning legions of pixelated protoOprahs marching across hedge fund computer monitors, I thought about the virtual economy of unrestrained speculation and hallucinatory leveraging that helped bring about this crisiscum-catastrophe...
...But one does not have to be a radical anticapitalist to see the tendency of unfettered markets to subordinate real needs to abstractions...
...Admittedly, beneath my mostly innocent intentions was a thin layer of Schadenfreude...
...For millions of Americans, and for countless more around the world, each day of their lives has been an "economic crisis...
...Though the crisis has been in many ways a sobering wake-up call, we still find ourselves drifting in a sea of abstractions and symbols, "pure numbers" and graphs...
...In an age when it's hard to find an aspect of life that hasn't succumbed to digital distancing, we need an analog economics: etched closer to the original source of wealth—people—and more intimately connected to material conditions...
...Excited by the opportunity to talk to someone on the "inside" of the crisis, I peppered him with questions, trying to avoid any particulars about what happened to him on the frontlines of the financial meltdown...
...For many of us, knowledge of the worst aspects of the crisis is still indirect, often read on a computer screen...
...I don't need to interview every little girl...
Vol. 56 • April 2009 • No. 2
