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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
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The Anthropology of the Credit Crisis - Magical Thinking, Irrationality & the Role of Inequality (Paperback)
Loot Price: R526
Discovery Miles 5 260
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The Anthropology of the Credit Crisis - Magical Thinking, Irrationality & the Role of Inequality (Paperback)
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Loot Price R526
Discovery Miles 5 260
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In 2005 I wrote a letter to the Financial Times describing the
unsustainable nature of the financial instruments (derivatives)
then being sold as insurance to protect investors from losses in
other assets, failure of institutions and other untoward events.
The complexity of these instruments and the magical nature of their
acceptance by investors led me to an examination of modern economic
practice from an anthropological perspective. The flight from risk
that derivatives represent is an ancient component of vertebrate
life and is embedded in the caching of many animals. Other aspects
of modern economics are residues of the history of human survival
in simple exploitation of resources. The problem with the financial
foundations of modern capitalism is that they are rooted in trends
of social ideology that have come to be a structural component of
economic and political entities since the development of economic
systems in the late Neolithic. We have been a genus, that of Homo,
for about 2.5 million years, and a species, that of sapiens, for
perhaps as much as 200,000 years, but over either period, the type
of means by which we made a living was hunting and gathering. This
strategy required continuous mobility and cooperation between band
members. The nature of our current survival strategy, that of
complex society only began about 10,000 years ago in the earliest
sedentary communities. So one might say that our current life style
is new, adapting and tenuous. I described the central aspects of
this ideology in my 2004 book, Sustainability, Human Ecology and
the Collapse of Complex Societies, published by the Edwin Mellen
Press. The purpose of this present book is to clarify the
mechanisms by which this ideology has come to permeate most all
religious as well as political belief systems and create conditions
for financial booms, busts and economic hardship.
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