How to Do Things With Words

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

/pdf/social-capital-a-theory-of-social-structure-and-action-4m7poq6byy.pdf

Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

This analysis of the origins and development of a key financial derivatives market, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, suggests that social interaction in such markets generates trust, permits solution of collective action problems, and affects pricing. The growing cognitive complexity of option trading implies that the unaided human being cannot be homo economicus: material means of calculation have become constitutive of economic action, and economic theory has become performative. The empirical history of option pricing falls into three distinct periods, and the paper postulates that "cultural memory" of the 1987 crash explains the pattern of pricing in the most recent period.

Negotiating a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange

– Our paper contributes to the literature on financialization of modern economy and relies on firm staff data instead of the usual company accounts data. It uses for this aim several indicators that reveal the direct or indirect power of contemporary finance: importance and relative concentration within top paid wageearners, of the finance sector, of holdings in non-finance firms, of business consulting, and of financial managers in non-finance firms. Concentration of the finance sector among top wage earners seems to be the most striking phenomenon of the financialization process. The article then examines the impact of financialization on socio-spatial inequalities. To the increase in inequality, a phenomenon already known and demonstrated in our previous work, adds a phenomenon of territory division between the “global city” (Greater Paris and in particular its business district of La Défense) which has an international financial center and other parts of the territory. Thus, the process of spatial segregation becomes massive once we climb high enough in the wage distribution and we take into account the workplace. Albeit on a smaller scale, the concentration of working rich produced by financialization contributes to the residential ghettoization of the wealthiest wage earners.

Is finance responsible for the rise in wage inequality in France

Que faut-il pour etre heureux ? Quelle place occupe le travail dans la vie des Francais et des Francaises ? Quels sont les aspects du travail susceptibles de favoriser un rapport heureux ou malheureux a l'activite professionnelle ? A l'heure du passage controverse aux 35 heures, autant de questions qui invitent a repenser la place du travail et du bonheur dans la vie quotidienne.
Didactique, clair, et toujours stimulant, cet ouvrage, resultat d'une enquete menee sur plusieurs annees, est parseme de temoignages vivants dans lesquels le lecteur se reconnaitra facilement et puisera matiere a expliquer ses propres ambivalences dans son rapport au travail. Car si les conditions objectives de travail participent de ce rapport, d'autres facteurs comme la trajectoire sociale ou le sexe sont decisifs. On apprend egalement que si un surcroit d'autonomie est synonyme de bonheur chez les cadres, il ne l'est pas necessairement chez les ouvriers ; que le bonheur et surtout le malheur au travail se rencontrent dans toutes les categories socio-professionnelles ; et que le sentiment d'exploitation, qui definissait hier la condition ouvriere, a pris d'autres contours et fait aujourd'hui partie integrante du vecu collectif.

Travailler pour être heureux ? le bonheur et le travail en France

In this paper, we study the impact of financialization on the rise in inequality in 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2011 and measure the respective roles of various forms of financialization: the growth of the financial sector; the growth of one of its subcomponents, financial markets; the financialization of non-financial firms; and the financialization of households. We test these impacts using cross-country panel regressions in OECD countries. As dependent measures we use Solt's (2009) Gini index, the World Top Incomes Database, and OECD inter-decile inequality measures. We show first that the share of the finance sector within the GDP is a substantial driver of world inequality, explaining between 20 and 40 percent of its increase from 1980 to 2007. When we decompose this financial sector effect, we find that this evolution was mainly driven by the increase in the volume of stocks traded in national stock exchanges and by the volume of shares held as assets in banks' balance sheets. By contrast, the financialization of non-financial firms and of households does not play a substantial role. Based on this inequality test, we therefore interpret financialization as being mainly a phenomenon of marketization, redefined as the growing amount of social energy devoted to the trade of financial instruments on financial markets.

Financialization Is Marketization! A Study on the Respective Impact of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality

In this article, I study the impact of financialization on the rise in inequality in 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2011 and measure the respective roles of various forms of financialization: the growth of the financial sector; the growth of one of its subcomponents, financial markets; the financialization of non-financial firms; and the financialization of households. I test these impacts using cross-country panel regressions in OECD countries. I show first that the share of the finance sector within the GDP is a substantial driver of world inequality, explaining between 20 and 40 percent of its increase from 1980 to 2007. When I decompose this financial sector effect, I find that this evolution was mainly driven by the increase in the volume of stocks traded in national stock exchanges and by the volume of shares held as assets in banks’ balance sheets. By contrast, the financialization of non-financial firms and of households does not play a substantial role. Based on this inequality test, I therefore interpret financialization as being mainly a phenomenon of marketization, redefined as the growing amount of social energy devoted to the trade of financial instruments on financial markets.

https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-3/june/SocSci_v3_495to519.pdf

Financialization Is Marketization! A Study of the Respective Impacts of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality

/pdf/critique-de-livre-piketty-thomas-le-capital-au-xxie-siecle-1n10yz5dok.pdf

Olivier Godechot

Papers

Is finance responsible for the rise in wage inequality in France

Travailler pour être heureux ? le bonheur et le travail en France

Financialization Is Marketization! A Study on the Respective Impact of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality

Financialization Is Marketization! A Study of the Respective Impacts of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality

[Critique de livre] Piketty, Thomas: Le capital au XXIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2013)