An introduction to the sociology of money, foregrounding how money embodies social relations

"Money in a Free Society" contains 18 provocative essays from Congdon, an influential economic adviser to the Thatcher government in the U.K. and one of the world's leading monetary commentators. He calls for a return to stable money growth and sound public finances, and argues that these remain the best answers to the problems facing modern capitalism.

Nobel Prize-winning economist explains why we need to reclaim finance for the common good The reputation of the financial industry could hardly be worse than it is today in the painful aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. New York Times best-selling economist Robert Shiller is no apologist for the sins of finance—he is probably the only person to have predicted both the stock market bubble of 2000 and the real estate bubble that led up to the subprime mortgage meltdown. But in this important and timely book, Shiller argues that, rather than condemning finance, we need to reclaim it for the common good. He makes a powerful case for recognizing that finance, far from being a parasite on society, is one of the most powerful tools we have for solving our common problems and increasing the general well-being. We need more financial innovation—not less—and finance should play a larger role in helping society achieve its goals. Challenging the public and its leaders to rethink finance and its role in society, Shiller argues that finance should be defined not merely as the manipulation of money or the management of risk but as the stewardship of society's assets. He explains how people in financial careers—from CEO, investment manager, and banker to insurer, lawyer, and regulator—can and do manage, protect, and increase these assets. He describes how finance has historically contributed to the good of society through inventions such as insurance, mortgages, savings accounts, and pensions, and argues that we need to envision new ways to rechannel financial creativity to benefit society as a whole. Ultimately, Shiller shows how society can once again harness the power of finance for the greater good.

Classical sociology considered money as central to the functioning of modern society, relatingit to a progressive expansion of instrumental rationality and the emergence of weaker social ties.Modern money, the universal equivalent described by Simmel, facilitates theexchange of goods and values by providing a single unit of account. This “frees” people and thingsfrom traditional social ties and makes them free to “sell” their work and trade goods on markets thatincreasingly erode national borders. Modern money thus frees the individual from traditional socialties and facilitates the creation of ever larger and more inter-connected markets. Sardex money, onthe other hand, seems to work in the opposite direction: the weak social ties of ordinary economictransactions are replaced by strong ones, characterised by a high level of reciprocity and by an ethical code. Furthermore the movement of goods is restricted to the regional level and much isdone to promote economic exchanges between member companies.

Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives. Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior. Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in. Demanding transparency is only the first step. An intelligible society would assure that key decisions of its most important firms are fair, nondiscriminatory, and open to criticism. Silicon Valley and Wall Street need to accept as much accountability as they impose on others.

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Sometimes referred to as "the last taboo," money has remained something of a secret within psychoanalysis. Ironically, while it is an ingredient in almost every encounter between analyst and patient, the analyst's personal feelings about money are rarely discussed openly or in any great depth. So what is it about money that relegates it to the background, both on the couch and off? In Money Talks, Brenda Berger, Stephanie Newman, and their excellent cast of contributors address this and other questions surrounding the tender topic of money, how we talk about it, and how it talks to us. Its multiple meanings are explored in the contexts of patients and analysts and the ways in which they relate, in the training and practice of the analysts themselves, as well as the psychological and cultural consequences of having too much or too little in both flush and tight economic times. Throughout, a clinical sensibility is brought to bear on money's softly spoken place in therapy and life. Money Talks paves the way for an open discourse into the psychology of money and its pervasive influence on the psyche of both patient and analyst.

For ages, money has meant little metal disks and rectangular slips of paper. Yet the usefulness of physical money -- to say nothing of its value -- is coming under fire as never before. Intrigued by the distinct possibility that cash will soon disappear, author and Wired contributing editor David Wolman sets out to investigate the future of money...and how it will affect your wallet. Wolman begins his journey by deciding to shun cash for an entire year -- a surprisingly successful experiment (with a couple of notable exceptions). He then ventures forth to find people and technologies that illuminate the road ahead. In Honolulu, he drinks Mai Tais with Bernard von NotHaus, a convicted counterfeiter and alternative-currency evangelist whom government prosecutors have labeled a domestic terrorist. In Tokyo, he sneaks a peek at the latest anti-counterfeiting wizardry, while puzzling over the fact that banknote forgers depend on society's addiction to cash. In a downtrodden Oregon town, he mingles with obsessive coin collectors -- the people who are supposed to love cash the most, yet don't. And in rural Georgia, he examines why some people feel the end of cash is Armageddon's warm-up act. After stops at the Digital Money Forum in London and Iceland's central bank, Wolman flies to Delhi, where he sees first-hand how cash penalizes the poor more than anyone--and how mobile technologies promise to change that. Told with verve and wit, The End of Money explores an aspect of our daily lives so fundamental that we rarely stop to think about it. You'll never look at a dollar bill the same again.

Project Society After Money is an interdisciplinary project between commons theory, evolutionary political economy, media studies and sociology, that enter into a dialogue with one another in order to look at their specific theories and criticisms of money. Conceived as the beginning of a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue, the possibilities of post-monetary forms of organization and production are taken into account and examined. On one hand there is a lot of talk about 'digital revolution', 'mediatized society', 'networks', 'Industry 4.0'. On the other hand the present is described in terms of crisis: 'financial crisis', 'economic crisis', 'planetary boundaries'. At once there is the description of a media-technological change along with massive social and ecological disruptions. Society After Money is based on the premise that there might be a conflict between digital media/digital technology and the medium of money – and perhaps new digital possibilities that allow alternative forms of economy. It criticizes what is normally seen as self-evident and natural, namely that social coordination has to be done by the medium of money. We're left with a highly innovative collection of contributions that initiates a broader social discourse on the role of money in the global society of the 21st century.

The contributors to this volume draw upon their deep backgrounds in finance, the social sciences, arts, and the humanities to create a new way of understanding derivative capitalism that does justice to its technical, social, and cultural dimensions. The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated both that derivatives are capable of producing great wealth and that their deregulation and privatization cannot control the risks that they produce. A popular reaction is to focus on the regulation or abolition of derivative finance. These authors take a different tack and instead raise the question: if we should want access to the wealth that derivatives are capable of producing, what kind of social institutions and policies would be needed to make such wealth production work for the benefit of all of us? Since this question goes to the very heart of what kind of society is most desirable, the volume argues that we need both a social understanding of the derivative and a derivative understanding of the social. The derivative reading of the social employs a small set of financial concepts to understand certain defining dimensions of contemporary reality. The central concept is that of volatility and its relations to risk, uncertainty, hedging, optionality, and arbitrage. The social reading of the derivative involves anthropological discussions of the gift, ritual, play, and performativity and provides us with frames of embodiment for analyzing, through action and event, the ways derivatives do their work.