How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have se...
The self-actualization philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world arou...
Still, the introduction of numbers, the standardization of types of character, ability, monster, treasure, spell, the concept of ability scores and hit-points, had profound effects when one moved from...
There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price-fixing. One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the...
The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play.
The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled in the Sabbath year (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who lang...
For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing t...
One of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation—of what it claims lif...
When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: gi...
What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of protection money, and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him wi...
Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of her life waiting for the light to change.
If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his p...
If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, Hand me the wrench, his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, And what do I get for it?—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Gol...
As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.
People, everywhere, are prone to two completely contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency to be playfully creative just for the sake of it; on the other, a tendency to agree with anyone wh...
What the public, the workforce, the electorate, consumers, and the population all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucra...
The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service.
The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia’s financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of breaking the tablets, that is, the debt re...
States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least,
One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests—actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash...