As part of my last big dissertation push, I’ve spent the last month reading through introductory economics textbooks published 1890-1960. The variety and content of these textbooks has been very interesting*, and in addition to many relevant passages for my own work on the history of economic statistics and macroeconomic thinking, I’ve also come across other tidbits. Today I found one that I thought I’d share because it shows just how radically a field can shift in some of its basic conceptions in a few decades, and because I think it reads like sociology which fits into a little narrative I have that economic sociology now is very resonant with (the old) institutionalist economics from the 1920s-1940s. The quote comes from Lutz and Stanton (1923, p.11) An Introduction to Economics and shows just how radical the human capital revolution was, at least for some:

Human attributes, talents, and qualities are also scarce, but we must be careful not to regard them as wealth. The reason for the distinction is that the person who possesses the unusual gift or talent is first and last a human being, whose personality is to be respected and whose well-being is the goal of all economic activity. If we class the talents of the gifted as wealth, it is a short and easy step to regard the possessors of these gifts as existing mainly for the services which they render, and not as free and independent persons. Under slavery, the talents of the slave might have been regarded, properly enough as part of the wealth of the owner. It is inconsistent with the principles of human freedom, which we now hold sacred, to confuse man as a means for the production of wealth with man as the end of economic action. No person should be degraded to the position of a mere means to the enjoyment of others. We might be in danger of doing this if we regarded human qualities as wealth, scarce though they might be.

The first author, Lutz, was no crazy radical, but rather a respected tax economist who worked on various government committees and taught at Oberlin, Stanford, and Princeton. And yet it’s hard to imagine a more strident rejection of human capital as a metaphor than calling it “inconsistent with the principles of human freedom.” A different economics for a different time.

* If you’re into that sort of thing, at least.

I am very pleased to announce that Administrative Science Quarterly has just posted the online version of my forthcoming article with Russ Funk, Derivatives and Deregulation: Financial Innovation and the Demise of Glass–Steagall. Here’s the abstract:

Regulators, much like market actors, rely on categorical distinctions. Innovations that are ambiguous to regulatory categories but not to market actors present a problem for regulators and an opportunity for innovative firms. Using a wide range of primary and secondary, qualitative and quantitative sources, we trace the history of one class of innovative financial derivatives—interest rate and foreign exchange swaps—to show how these instruments undermined the separation of commercial and investment banking established by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 even as overt political action failed to do so. Swaps did not fit neatly into existing product categories—futures, securities, loans—and thus evaded regulatory scrutiny for many years. The market success of swaps put commercial and investment banks into direct competition and, in so doing, undermined Glass–Steagall. Drawing on this case, we theorize that ambiguous innovations may disrupt the regulatory status quo and shift the political burden onto parties that want to maintain existing regulations. Our findings also suggest that category-spanning innovations may be more valuable to market participants if regulators find them difficult to interpret.

Many readers of this blog gave us helpful advice over the past four years; thank you all very much! And let us know what you think of the paper.

The 2014 Junior Theorists Symposium is just three weeks away! Below, please find an updated schedule. JTS 2014 will be held at the University of California Berkeley in 60 Evans Hall. A complete list of paper abstracts is available here (pdf link). If you have any questions, please contact Jordanna Matlon and myself at juniortheorists@gmail.com.

Junior Theorists Symposium
University of California (Berkeley)
60 Evans Hall
August 15, 2014

8:30 – 9:00 | Coffee and Bagels

9:00 – 10:50 | Culture, Action, and Difference
* Michael Halpin (University of Wisconsin – Madison) – “Science and Sociodicy: Neuroscientific Explanations of Social Problems”
* Ellis Monk (University of Chicago) – “Bodily Capital: Capturing the Role of the Body in Social Inequality”
* Daniel Sherwood (The New School) – “Acting Through the Margin of Freedom: Bourdieu as a Social Movement Theorist”
Discussant: Omar Lizardo (University of Notre Dame)

10:50 – 11:00 | Coffee

11:00 – 12:50 | Measures of Worth
* Alison Gerber (Yale University) – “Tradition, Rationalization and Worth: A Theory of Decommensuration”
* Katherine Kenny (University of California – San Diego) – “The Biopolitics of Global Health: Life and Death and Neoliberal Time”
* Brandon Vaidyanathan (Rice University) – “A Cultural Theory of Differentiation”
Discussant: Marion Fourcade (University of California – Berkeley)

12:50 – 2:00 | Lunch

2:00 – 3:50 | Place and Perspective
* Hillary Angelo (New York University) – “From the City as a Lens to Urbanization as a Way of Seeing: Refocusing Social Categories for an Urban Planet”
* Jennifer Carlson (University of Toronto) – “Citizen-Protectors: Guns, Masculinity and Citizenship in an Age of Decline”
* Victoria Reyes (Princeton University) – “Global Borderlands: A Case Study of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines”
Discussant: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)

4:00 – 5:30 | After-panel: The Boundaries of Theory
* Stefan Bargheer (University of California – Los Angeles)
* Claudio Benzecry (University of Connecticut)
* Margaret Frye (Harvard University)
* Julian Go (Boston University)
* Rhacel Parreñas (University of Southern California)

5:30 – ? | Theory in the Wild: Beer, wine, and good conversation (off-site)

The Junior Theorists Symposium is an open event. In order to facilitate planning, please RSVP by sending an email to juniortheorists@gmail.com with the subject line “JTS RSVP.” We suggest an on-site donation of $20 per faculty member and $10 per graduate student to cover event costs.