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4 - The Money Game

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2019

Alf Hornborg
Affiliation:
Lunds Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

In this chapter, I will draw in greater detail on Karl Polanyi’s ([1944] 1957) analysis of the structural causes of human suffering that are immanent in the nineteenth-century idea of a free and self-regulating market, particularly for commoditized labor, and on David Graeber’s (2011) inquiry into the 5,000-year history of such commoditization. I shall again trace the structural repression that they illuminate to the logic of general purpose money, viewed as a specific human artifact attributed with a particular social and ecological inertia. Such inertia of artifacts has been experienced by any player of a board game, and it is no coincidence that the discipline of economics has found extensive use for game theory.1 The use of specific artifacts throughout human networks generates algorithmic regularities in social behavior that can be mathematically simulated. The current author makes no pretense to proficiency in such methods, but at a general level, I propose that the trajectories of human societies reflect the design of the artifacts that regulate their exchange relations, and that policies for transforming society thus cannot avoid considering how such artifacts are designed.

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Chapter
Information
Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex
, pp. 66 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • The Money Game
  • Alf Hornborg, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
  • Online publication: 24 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554985.005
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  • The Money Game
  • Alf Hornborg, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
  • Online publication: 24 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554985.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Money Game
  • Alf Hornborg, Lunds Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene
  • Online publication: 24 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554985.005
Available formats
×