Blockchain Papers

Andreas Langenohl

As blockchain technologies are discussed in their political dimensions, this paper questions the political implications of developments in decentralized finance (DeFi). It looks at the ways that DeFi projects refer to game theory as a template for designing the integration of off-chain financial processes into on-chain processes. DeFi’s reference to game theory carries normative understandings of social coordination that oscillate between (liberal) cooperation and (neo-liberal) non-cooperation and defection. This is evidenced in the ways that DeFi installs fundamental uncertainty as well as the reliability of participants’ information, as the key resource for modeling social coordination. While referring to a libertarian notion of ‘collective intelligence, ’ the models tend to involve participants in high-stake transactions under conditions of uncertainty. These results have consequences for the social studies of finance more generally: The prominence of game theory in DeFi indicates that the performativity of economic theory, often depicted in the ways that theory-derived models enable pricing calculation and the transformation of uncertainty into risk, may also result in the celebration of radical uncertainty as a resource of strategic action.

Antonio Andreoni

Hugh D. Whittaker, Timothy J. Sturgeon, Toshie Okita and Tianbiao Zhu, Compressed Development: Time and Timing in Economics and Social Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 295 pp. £ 60.00 hardback. Graham Harrison, Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 304 pp. £ 58.74 hardback. At the turn of the 21st century, development research witnessed the consolidation of a socio-economic transformation paradigm centred around individual agency (and freedoms) and localized processes of empowerment (and stable forms of change). Within this paradigm, development processes are mainly mediated through markets and enhanced by good governance institutions. Neoclassical economics, as well as humanist approaches to development advanced by the capability approaches of Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2000), provide theoretical foundations to this paradigm. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Agenda for 2000–2015 was a clear manifestation of this established consensus at the turn of the century (United Nations, 2000). Aligning with a liberal tradition, these theories have promoted research in development policies and the implementation of institutional market failure fixes that deliberately avoid a direct engagement with the political economy of structural transformation, the developmental role of the state, and the full reality of development in context. Examples of the transformative structural dynamics that the conventional development discourse struggles to grasp include changes in the organization of global production and their impact on the development of countries; technological changes driven by information and communications technology and, more recently, digitalization; the rise of China and the ‘great doubling’ in the global labour markets. There have been several calls for new syntheses, integrating alternative research frameworks which can address the current reality of global development. These include a call to rediscover high-level theories of the classical political economy and developmentalist traditions.11 See, for example, Chang and Andreoni (2021) and other contributions in the special issue on ‘Bringing Production Back into Development’; Kholi (2004) on the developmental state; and Kvangraven (2021) on the ‘dependency research programme’. The widening contradictions between the dominant development research agenda and the reality of local and global development have been addressed mainly by scholars ‘trespassing’ across disciplinary boundaries (Hirschman, 1981). This includes economists working in the classical political economy tradition — Marxist in particular but also Structuralists, Schumpeterians and Old Institutionalists — alongside anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. This essay considers two recent books whose authors breach these traditions and disciplines. They both make a significant, and in many respects complementary, contribution in pushing ahead a new wave of high-development theory better equipped — both theoretically and empirically — to address development and underdevelopment in the 21st century. The first of these two books, Compressed Development: Time and Timing in Economic and Social Development (hereafter Compressed Development) by Hugh D. Whittaker, Timothy J. Sturgeon, Toshie Okita and Tianbiao Zhu, advances a new theoretical synthesis within which the global matrix of technological and organizational change (and their co-evolving relationships) is framed and linked to state and markets relations (and their embedding and disembedding dialectics). The authors use these theoretical constructs to identify and document distinctive features of the current ‘era’ of development — what they call ‘compressed development’. In their view, there is something unique in the regime of compression experienced by countries from 1990 onwards. Compressed development is a historical phase of global capitalist transformation characterized by ‘out-of-sequence’ and ‘simultaneous’ phenomena. For example, the authors point to the coexistence of ‘premature de-industrialisation’ in developed economies and ‘thin industrialisation’ among several middle-income countries (p. 23). Furthermore, Compressed Development highlights how ‘transmission mechanisms’ such as global value chains (GVCs) and the disembedding of global markets lead to the spread of phenomena like financialization and interdependence across developed and developing countries. Indeed, the book points to mutual interdependencies between countries whereby national dynamics shape (and are shaped by) state–market and organization–technology relationships unfolding in different countries. For example, the compressed development framework highlights how imperial powers shaped the development journey of ‘the rest’ through ‘policy space compression’, as well as showing how the rise of the rest — China in particular — has affected early and late industrializers including America and Japan (the so-called ‘China shock’). These structural interdependencies pose new development trade-offs in the forms of ‘dual challenges’, especially for countries aspiring to achieve socially inclusive industrialization. This is perhaps the second most important contribution of this book — pointing out that social policy was a key, although implicit, ingredient of late industrialization (Mkandawire, 2004) and that this key policy has become increasingly difficult to deliver under compressed development. ‘Recent developers now face simultaneous challenges in social development which early and late developers confronted sequentially’ (p. 160). Education and health are sectors in which the double burdens and challenges are most acute and difficult to address. In the education sector, for example, the need for inclusive ‘basic education’ co-exists alongside the need for ‘advanced education’ towards technological and innovation capabilities development. These complex relationships and policy challenges are finally addressed in Chapter 8 of Compressed Development with the introduction of the idea of an ‘adaptive developmental state’ and the discussion of the need for ‘dynamic state‒civil society relationships’ (p. 185). Building on the case of China, the authors convincingly point to the importance of understanding the opportunities offered by multilevel governance structures and incentives, including ‘local developmentalism’; they also highlight new problems posed by decentralization projects for overall policy coherence and integration at the time when these are increasingly necessary. The book adopts a political economy lens to advance a stylized theory of an adaptive developmental state. However, it does not fully engage with the problems that ‘the rest of the rest’, that is, countries that have not even managed to reach their middle-income status, are facing in their efforts to initiate and sustain their infant processes of capitalist transformation. This is where Compressed Development finds an interesting interface and starts a dialogue with the second book reviewed in this essay. The second book, Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism (hereafter Developmentalism) by Graham Harrison, offers an ambitious critical political economy framework that takes on — directly and forcefully — the ‘normatively pleasing’ approach to development embodied by capability approaches and germane liberal development perspectives (p. 48). The key historical anchor of the book is that while romanticized historiographies of capitalist transformation should be avoided, we cannot escape from acknowledging the fact that developed capitalist societies have achieved generalized conditions of material progress which are historically unprecedented. Within developed capitalist societies these conditions of material progress are so ‘pervasive and obvious’ that they are often not recognized — even though ‘they are very easily recognizable if one does not live in these conditions’ (p. 7). Using Tanzania as a standpoint — a country where a radical transformation in the material conditions of people's daily lives has still to come — the book centres the analysis on the tension between progress and agency, as a tension between the normative and the transformative. This is central to development understood as a process of capitalist transformation, an untidy process that is in fact intrinsically (p. Within the theoretical framework advanced in of development with a process of and transformative from changes in and of the many in the of this is, a and not a for capitalist development. this process of capitalist political and are to direct this process of towards a structural transformation in the socio-economic and institutional of the Indeed, capitalist transformation is developmental to the that it political and political for is in this as a political economy within which development is intrinsically and — the of state — and it if it is not At the of this political economy there is a process of state whereby the state the and of a capitalist and, in so both the and of the capitalist transformation. 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In this the of China and are as of we on the from both books, Compressed Development and the is with a of the importance and of integrating these research into a new ‘compressed This essay has key contributions by Compressed Development and that understanding of and the political economy of capitalist transformation. books a of development whose can be to classical political economy and on and political economy structures and their books from an to make of a production Compressed Development with a the of a late and very within the and on the of in (p. This of the and the new — something that in developing countries often — is difficult to within a of development and in Andreoni with an in which the Tanzania with an Tanzania in when has in this become dominant (p. This is centred on the and of the The in to Tanzania to a capitalist transformation under and the of the 21st century an to this analysis the developmental of Tanzania with that of books also a of development as capitalist transformation in which production transformation is with social and institutional and state They also the idea that the developmental state is to the that it can deliver social that is, be inclusive (and does not in of the books, their and but this is with their Compressed Development on the in which the state is by good and social under a compressed development on the in which the state can a through of (and This is in fact an ingredient of the development In Compressed double of and disembedding are central in the of a theory of the while is to the In a Marxist lens is to and dynamics in the process of state both books a that is, the integration of theory and In the case of Compressed this integration for an framework in which and historical time and agency is This does not that there is agency, but that development in a and This tradition can be to the of classical development economists — from to — but also to scholars of technological change and such as and In the case of the historical is mediated by the it is directly in Marxist political economy and a approach to In and can be to the of and are these books in the of a political economy of developmental between the books can be as an approach that is liberal approaches to but an approach in the reality of and material of the state. For Harrison, — a approach to — is a to a change that is within as and the historical of is on In Compressed the authors are mainly on towards a developmental state. recent contributions in Development and have at the for example, Chang and Whittaker, Sturgeon, Okita and a new of developmental state whose is to be the of multilevel governance and local in China Chapter Compressed Development points to opportunities offered by projects in a time of compression such as and also points to the fact that this two local but it does so at the of policy coherence and the of is more in a time of but the of many social and on the address of these contradictions and and in society an important the state–market and co-evolving They call for state‒civil society (p. a often but difficult to in especially at a time when forms of such as political and have been in This is perhaps where the two books reviewed in this essay to even on the of the we society we the society in capitalist countries like and Tanzania in so-called advanced countries like the This an but it is a central In both the of and policies as in Compressed as well as the political of and a material of social change that the state and a of for as in These two books, in this other and from two different an important contribution to these and for the Andreoni is of Development Economics at University of is also University of and an of the of Development has on the political economy of development and

Sinclair Davidson

Ludwig von Mises produced an impossibility theorem indicating that economic calculation in the absence of market prices was impossible. This gave rise to the ‘socialist calculation debate’ in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper makes use of the insights of that debate to shed light on other situations where decision makers are required to allocate resources in areas where there are no market prices. A pertinent example would be most corporate social responsibility programs. In the absence of market prices local information cannot be communicated to decision makers. The paper further argues that blockchain technology can create the institutional environment for markets to emerge and consequently overcome the problem of missing prices.

Andrew Isaak, Suleika Bort, Michael Woywode

Research has shown that cognitive, normative, and regulative legitimacy are important for new market emergence. Little known, however, are the conditions and dynamics under which these three forms of legitimacy interact over time and in different institutional settings. In this study, we investigate the emergence and development of the new market for cryptocurrencies (i.e., Bitcoin) using a comprehensive dataset on trading in 49 countries between 2010 and 2020. Our study reveals that all three forms of legitimacy drive Bitcoin trading. Surprisingly, we also found increases in trading volume when Bitcoin was declared illegal and when normative support preceded, rather than followed, regulative legitimacy. Our results shed light on the relationship between cognitive, normative, and regulative legitimacy and their interactions in the emergence and development of a new contested market over time.

William J. Luther, Nikhil Sridhar

No abstract is available for this record.

Cristopher Morales Bonilla

In recent decades, the birth of crypto-currency has challenged the monopoly of paper money controlled by national central banks and their respective states. From a decentralized conception of the economy, digital currencies such as Bitcoin have tried to replace traditional money as a new and more democratic form of economic relationship. However, it is necessary to confront these new forms of economic exchange with Karl Marx's analyses in Das Kapital to see whether they really represent an effective alternative to capitalism or whether they fall into new forms of capitalist relations.

Thibault Schrepel

No abstract is available for this record.

Nilanjan Raghunath, The Polanyi Society

Cryptocurrencies present a disruption to financial institutions, investments, and markets. Should governments therefore allow cryptocurrencies or ban them? How will they affect the flow of money? What form of economic justice should the cryptocurrency market adopt? Who should be involved in the determining of the economic justice? I claim that Michael Polanyi’s theories about employment, money, trade, and his overarching sociotechnical vision of society and the economy can help us understand the current labour market challenges and solutions in view of the digital economy.

Larry Lohmann

No abstract is available for this record.

Herminio Bodon, Pedro Bustamante, Marcela Gomez, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy · 9 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Usman W. Chohan

This chapter seeks to contextualize the nature of cryptocurrencies as an alternate form of capital that, while being inspired by cryptoanarchist thought, has come to embody extreme forms of inequality among its owners. The concentration of wealth produces a “whale effect” that, as the chapter argues, in fact reflects the forms of inequalities that are found in the ownership of traditional forms of capital. The chapter thus alludes to the mismatch between the professed cryptoanarchist philosophical bent of cryptocurrency owners and the reality of capital ownership in the cryptocurrency domain; while cryptoanarchism postulates autonomy, decentralization, and the spread of ownership, the whale effect suggests that cryptocurrencies are insufficiently different from traditional forms of capital in this regard. This challenges the degree to which the praxis of cryptocurrencies coheres with the philosophy of cryptoanarchism.

Prateek Goorha

I propose a method for introducing ‘context’ within the contractual environment based on a simple and intuitive application of control theory. The approach permits looking at several interesting practical features of contracts, be they incomplete, complete or smart, within a single framework. I define a contextual environment with the help of an interaction between three distinct spaces: a market-based contractual space framed within a formal institutional space and an even larger cultural space. Each space is characterized by a governing law built on a selection of control mechanisms that differ in their approach as well as their reliance on information generated from feedback mechanisms. I suggest how these governing laws tie the contextual spaces together and present some ideas on how they evolve through their interactions with other spaces. JEL: D20, D86, P50, Z10

Mark Longaker

In the 1980s, Deirdre McCloskey argued that economists should look beyond their mathematical formulas and their positivist methodologies. If “economic style appeals in various ways to an ethos worthy of belief,” then economists should “give up their quaint modernism and open themselves to a wider range of discourse… . [They should] examine their language in action and converse more politely with others in the conversation of humanity” (McCloskey Rhetoric, 11, 167). Much broader than her original “rhetoric of economics,” McCloskey’s recent “humanomics,” asks us to consider cultural as well as economic forces when investigating human prosperity (Bourgeois, 553–559). McCloskey’s humanomics is one example of the rhetoric of economics clearing the way for new scholarly efforts in the social sciences. The articles in this special collection move in another direction, towards rhetorical analysis and historical inquiry. Like McCloskey’s humanomics, the historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics is a worthy sequel to McCloskey’s pioneering efforts.Robert McDonald’s “From “Incentive Furie” to “Incentives to Efficiency,” or the Movement of “Incentive” in Neoclassical Thought,” for instance, rhetorically analyzes works by Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson. Echoing McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, McDonald suggests a modest disciplinary conclusion about the rhetorical constitution of economic science. He notes the “poetical” quality of incentives, their “call to act rationally,” and their rhetorically objectified constitution as “the desired object that provides the key to unlocking a universal analysis of social reality” (this issue). But, instead of drawing conclusions about the discipline of economics or rhetoric’s economic function, McDonald asks: What does poetically constituted “incentive” do in our common conversations and our daily deliberations? The “rhetoric of economics” was a critical inquiry, part of the larger Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry that McCloskey and others began (1980) at the University of Iowa. McCloskey’s humanomics is a human science including cultural criticism, philosophical rumination, and statistical formulas. McDonald’s critical analysis of economic arguments is an historical inquiry into the local constitution and the specific function of public discourse. Like McDonald, the authors featured in this special issue share McCloskey’s two key insights. We all agree that economics is rhetorically constituted, and rhetoric is economically effective. But we attend to specific arguments, their rhetorical form, and their historical function.McDonald’s essay traces a common rhetorical turn across two centuries of argumentation. The first major segment of his argument explores the etymology of “incentive,” showing that the anthimeric movement from adjective to noun happened simultaneously in university hallways and vulgar conversations. Samuelson wasn’t the only twentieth-century voice chattering about “incentives.” We all were. McDonald’s etymology follows the evolution of a rhetorical commonplace. His analysis highlights its social effects: “the supersession of society by the economy” (this issue). He concludes with a question about contemporary policies. “[W]hat is repressed, negated, and transformed when incentives become a universal object”? (this issue).McDonald’s “incentive” has a centuries-old pedigree. Other topics of economic argumentation seem less senescent. In his contribution to this special issue, William O. Saas charts an important shift in U.S. presidential rhetoric: from the Keynesian definition of federal debt (a way to support publicly favored economic initiatives) to the neoliberal definition of a balanced budget (an eternal moral good, irrespective of federal obligations or economic imperatives). The analogy between the U.S. federal budget and a family’s finances became widespread during national conversations about Reaganite supply-side economics. The “pump priming” and “printing money” metaphors (both describing federal deficit spending during a recession) seem no older than the Federal Reserve System (1913). Yet the lines of argument that Saas analyzes have a long history.Writing in 1695, Secretary to the Treasury of Great Britain under William III, William Lowndes bickered with mercantilists who defined the balance of trade as a moral good. They further opposed revaluation of English specie (the early-modern version of “printing money”) on the grounds that such an action would lead to inflation. Mercantilists believed that England’s monetary problems could only be rectified by correcting the balance of trade and attracting foreign silver to English shores. Lowndes conceded his opponents’ definition, allowing that “the Ballance [sic] of Trade must be Rectified” (91). Exactly ten years later, based on a proto-Keynesian definition of federal debt, John Law (of Mississippi Company fame) suggested that the Scottish government allow monetization of land titles, essentially “printing money” to spur domestic industry. According to Law, “[a]n addition to the money adds to the value of the country, so long as money gives interest, it is imployed [sic]; and money imployed brings profit” (21–22). There are some important differences, of course, between the twentieth-century arguments that Saas analyzes and their seventeenth-century analogues. Saas looks at the Reaganite argument that a balanced budget, not balanced trade, is a moral good. And John Law may have presaged the Keynesian pump-priming metaphor, but he did not take the argument as far as the neo-Keynesians whom Saas favors. Nonetheless, this quick comparison shows a line of economic rhetoric stretching from seventeenth-century monetary arguments to twentieth-century fiscal disagreements.I do not have to demonstrate a storied legacy for the economic arguments that William Rodney Herring analyzes because he starts in the early eighteenth century. Herring’s historical scope aside, “Neither Pistols nor Sugar-Plumbs: The Rhetoric of Finance and the 1720 Bubbles” offers something else to the study of economic rhetoric: an attention to financial instruments as persuasive devices. Herring claims that early eighteenth-century offers to buy stocks at rates above or below par (face-value, as distinct from market value) were a kind of symbolic action, an effort to influence buyers’ choices by changing their perceptions. Herring’s contribution is twofold. In an analytical register, he contends that financial instruments themselves are rhetorical. In an historical register, he notes that financial instruments have historically held a rhetorical function. His analysis leads to contemporary political questions, not unlike those raised by McDonald and Saas. Herring asks, What persuasive force do financial instruments exert? McDonald ponders, How did Bentham’s anthimeria change into Samuelson’s common sense? Saas wonders, How have we defined credit and debt? While exploring common lines of economic argumentation, some explicitly discursive and others implicitly persuasive, all three articles indulge a wide historical scope and allow some political reflection.The remaining three articles in this collection, by contrast, present robust political implications supported by some historical reflection. The shared mix of history and advocacy—inquiry and argument—characterizes the new historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics.Joshua S. Hanan and Jeffrey St. Onge discuss the common antithesis between Wall Street and Main Street in their analysis of the 2015 movie The Big Short. Hanan and St. Onge point to a more fundamental antithesis between the oikos and the polis, arguing that the ancient Greeks privileged the polis, seeing the oikos as a “supplementary background” and the polis as “a sovereign domain of action” (this issue). Their genealogical inquiry reveals that moderns have reconfigured this order. The metonymic “Main Street” recedes into the background, while “Wall Street” becomes a “sphere of emergent freedom and autarky” (this issue). Hanan and St. Onge scrutinize an antithesis, adulating one economic class and its privileged sphere of activity while relegating the other to inconsequence.Such rhetorical antithesis, however, is neither peculiar to present-day finance, nor specific to modish Hollywood. Two moments remind us that the antithesis discussed by Hanan and St. Onge can be found in the infancy and midlife of modern economic argumentation. In late seventeenth-century England, land-owning gentry imagined their agricultural sphere as the productive arena where political action should take place, and they sneered at new financiers who invented financial instruments such as the Million Lottery Act and the Bank of England (1694). Like many English mercantilists and French Physiocrats, John Briscoe assumed that the truly “productive” sphere was agriculture, so the empowered political class should be the noble “Landed-Men,” not the usurious “monied-men” (19). He juxtaposed a privileged, agricultural, and aristocratic polis against the nonproductive (financial) oikos. Briscoe’s argument is classical in form, repeated through the ages, separating a productive from an unproductive sphere and depending on class interest. Two-and-a-half centuries later, John Maynard Keynes argued that global bankers had become a privileged class, global finance a dominant polis, to the detriment of the industrial oikos. Like the Wall Street/Main Street opposition, Keynes’s rentier/producer antithesis asserts an injustice, this time with the rentier unfairly in the privileged sphere and the manufacturer all but erased. According to Keynes, gradually eliminating interest (making “capital goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero”), would likewise eliminate “many of the objectionable features of capitalism.” Full employment would result from low (effectively zero) interest rates. The “rentier,” no longer able to make a living, would vanish. Entrepreneurial industrialists would become the properly privileged class. “[T]here would still be room … for enterprise and skill in the estimation of prospective yields” (221), so industry would become the new polis.I point to a long history behind the antithesis that Hanan and St. Onge locate in their contemporary analysis. But I want to emphasize that they find something more than a tired rhetorical juxtaposition of warring classes. Their genealogy explains that rhetorical activity is invested in the privileged polis (Wall Street) while the ambient background of necessity (Main Street) remains. They are analyzing an old trope while explaining its new turn, its contemporary economic effects. They add a new awareness: the dialectical structure of the oikos and the polis (Main Street and Wall Street) excludes the oikos; the rhetorical form diminishes Main Street’s agency. Something similar can be said about the topics discussed in Catherine Chaput’s and Crystal Broch Colombini’s articles. While Chaput and Colombini seek out old lines of economic argumentation, they find much more than tired commonplaces applied to present circumstances.Chaput and Colombini analyze supplemental arguments that shore up the economist’s dryly rational proof. Again, the historical precedence is not hard to find. Thomas Malthus’ demographic arguments inspired Thomas Carlyle’s oft-repeated characterization of economics: “the dismal science.” Harriet Martineau supplemented Malthus’s tomes about cyclical overpopulation and famine. She created characters who embodied rational prudence while suffering economic hardship. In one of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1834), Ella of Garveloch, a rich literary character, wisely steers her family through a wretched famine. Surrounded by suffering, she proclaims, in terms far more convincing than anything Malthus ever mouthed, “Evil is palliated by the caution of the prudent, by the emigration of the enterprising, and by other means which may yet remain” (102). Martineau’s characters are ethical arguments about how people should behave once they understand rational principles, such as “the operation of the principle of increase within narrow bounds” (Martineau 103). Ayn Rand, writing a century later, offered pathetic appeals to supplement the arid libertarian arguments of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Rand even theorized the necessity of her pathetic supplement, saying that her nakedly pro-capitalist novels were meant to emotionally convey a “sense of life” to a reader who would then induce “an intense, profoundly personal … value-meaning,” a meaning that might be deduced rationally but without the force of conviction (35). We could reason our way toward a belief in the free market, said Rand, or we could gaze upon the “artist’s view of man” (67), a sculpted Howard Roark or a daring Dagny Taggart. Rand and Martineau shared the belief that pathetic and ethical argumentation supplements rational economic deduction. Colombini’s and Chaput’s analyses present the ethical and the emotional appeals as not merely supplemental to the economic claim but rather as integral to the political economy.Colombini analyzes a moral argument commonly repeated during the recent housing market collapse. As she explains, the economist’s wholly rational definition of “strategic default” explains why a prudent person possessing an underwater mortgage should simply forfeit the property. But such rational action, if widespread, would harm banks and might cripple the financial sector. As a result, in public discourse, an ethically supplemental definition was added: Mortgage holders were said to be “walking away” from their homes and their responsibilities. The Martineau and Rand examples suggest that economic arguments require an ethical and pathetic sugarcoating to sweeten the rational pill. Colombini’s analysis of “walking away” suggests that the supplement is more than decoration. Without these moral public arguments, “rational” neoliberalism would not function. Rendered unpersuasive by its own cold ratiocination and unsustainable by its victims’ rational actions, neoliberalism depends upon the rhetorical strategies that Colombini discusses.Chaput explores Donald Trump’s economic arguments. She explains that an irrational and inconsistent Trumponomics mobilizes affect, that fluttery sensitivity and jittery responsivity energized by social media, image ads, and wearable technology. Working “along ontological axes,” Chaput illuminates a new pathetic appeal in a new rhetorical role (this issue). Trump’s pathos does not supplement his rational appeal. His affect is the argument. The “epistemic focus of the rhetoric of economic arguments” emphasized logos. Chaput picks up where McCloskey left off, by analyzing the affectively suasive dimension. Understanding affect requires Chaput’s “ontological focus” (this issue). Rand and Martineau offered ethical and pathetic supplements. Colombini and Chaput theorize ethical and pathetic economics. Aristotle once observed that rhetoric must appeal to the whole person. Chaput and Colombini suggest that our present-day economy enlists every felt conviction and mobilizes every bodily corpuscle. Like all persuasive efforts, rational economic theory requires ethical and pathetic appeals. Colombini and Chaput add to the classical maxim a contemporary reflection: Economic systems cannot survive without economic argumentation. Chaput directly states this when remarking that the neoliberal economy itself, like Trump’s zigzagging affective appeals, “not only moves in a decidedly nonlinear path, it produces a bodily thinking” (this issue). Affect is not just a rhetorical appeal; it’s a bio-political factory and an economic engine.At the twentieth century’s close, Deirdre McCloskey averred that the rhetoric of economics was not “intrinsically revolutionary or intrinsically conservative” (Knowledge 339). Her last and longest book, before the bourgeois virtue trilogy, circled back to a methodological conclusion: “Perhaps the time has come, after a useful childhood spent in positivism, for economists to grow up too” (Knowledge 396). While the authors featured in this special issue often separate their approach to economic rhetoric from McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, they all owe her a significant debt. Once she had cleared the positivist brush, other inquiries, such has her humanomics, could take seed. Like McCloskey’s initial and most recent program, the articles in this special issue require neither a neo-Marxian nor a neo-Keynesian tilt. Nonetheless, the historical analysis of economic rhetoric requires that we engage politics. Two decades ago, when she proclaimed her partisan neutrality, McCloskey was dodging typical accusations of postmodern relativism and radical nihilism, the alleged epistemological bedfellows of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Critically analyzing economic arguments can similarly avoid a partisan but not a political tilt. Historically situating and tracing economic arguments recalls an older paradigm—political economy—a paradigm that refused to separate public discourse from social science or partisan bickering from expert advice. In this introduction, I have argued that all the arguments analyzed in this special issue have long historical traditions. But more than these traditions of economic argumentation, the refusal to throw out the political baby with the positivist bathwater makes the contributions to this special issue properly rhetorical, fully humanist, and thoroughly historical.

Brendan Markey‐Towler

Blockchain technology makes it more feasible for individuals to exit political-socioeconomic systems at the level of the system itself and elect to accede freely to institutional systems which formulate, promulgate, keep and verify institutions and public records without a centralised authority. This essay investigates the dynamic of such a society in which political-socioeconomic systems may be organised using blockchain technology. We propose a theory of society as an evolutionary system in which the unit of selection is the institutional system associated with a particular blockchain or the state and selection pressures are applied by individuals deciding to interact within them and have their interactions entered into the public record. We establish the conditions under which institutions will thus be selected by considering the limits to substitutability and discover that any institutional system must meet requirements and provide sufficient complementarities in order to be selected and retained by the evolutionary process.

Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, E. Glen Weyl

We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Individuals make public goods contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is (proportional to) the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received. Under the standard model this yields first best public goods provision. Variations can limit the cost, help protect against collusion and aid coordination. We discuss applications to campaign finance, open source software ecosystems, news media finance and urban public projects. More broadly, we offer a resolution to the classic liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy by providing neutral and non-authoritarian rules that nonetheless support collective organization.

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

No abstract is available for this record.

Bill Maurer

The agencies of money gain new currency as new privately owned systems for creating and transferring value occupy the imagination of industry players and regulators, as well as us everyday folk. Experts have predicted the end of cash and coin almost as soon as modern governments standardized their issue. But before there was coin, there were records of transactions warranting other transactions and literally inscribing (in clay, stone, papyrus) the distributed agencies of human interaction. Asking after the infrastructures facilitating that transfer leads to the role of accounting not as a record of monetary interaction, but as that interaction itself. It is precisely a question of the distribution of agency: who shall make entries into the great ledger of human transaction and exchange? As the ledger pluralizes, who controls the cross-referencing, the gateways between newly dispersed accounts?

Meixing Dai, Moïse Sidiropoulos

Le bitcoin attire de plus en plus l'attention des spéculateurs, des consommateurs et des sites marchands, et augmente rapidement en capitalisation. Les autorités de régulation sont plus que jamais préoccupées par la façon dont il doit être traité du point de vue économique. Est-il une monnaie, une chaîne de Ponzi ou un actif financier très spéculatif ? Selon les réponses données à cette question, les réactions des autorités seront très différentes.

Ayushi Bajaj, Tai-Wei Hu, Guillaume Rocheteau, Mario Rafael Silva

No abstract is available for this record.

Marc Pilkington

A paraître

J. P. Smit, Filip Buekens, Du Plessis

Abstract What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale.

Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot, Jean‐Michel Servet

International audience

Ricardo Alonso, Wouter Dessein, Niko Matouschek

We examine the relationship between the organization of a multi-divisional firm and its ability to adapt production decisions to changes in the environment. We show that even if lower-level manag-ers have superior information about local conditions, and incentive conflicts are negligible, a centralized organization can be better at adapting to local information than a decentralized one. As a result, and in contrast to what is commonly argued, an increase in product market competition that makes adaptation more important can favor centralization rather than decentralization. (JEL D21, D23, F23, L22) The organization theorist Chester Barnard and the economist Friedrich Hayek shared the view that the “economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place ” (Hayek 1945, 524). But whereas Hayek viewed adaptation as an autonomous process, undertaken by individual economic actors, Barnard (1938) stressed the ability of organizations to engage in what Oliver Williamson (1996, 2002) calls “coordinated adaptation.” Williamson (1996, 103), referring to Barnard and challenging Hayek, argues that:

Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot, Jean‐Michel Servet

Le bitcoin est un element emblematique du developpement des crypto-monnaies. Nous montrons qu'il ne peut etre considere comme un commun contrairement a la propagande que sa promotion necessite. Nous nous interrogerons sur le fait qu'il puisse etre considere comme une monnaie avant de souligner que cet instrument financier contribuerait plutot a participer a detruire les communs ou au moins a ne jamais les servir