The Political Economy of Financialized Life

Catalog description

Whether it is getting an education, accessing healthcare, planning for retirement, buying a house, a car, or just groceries, modern impersonal finance plays a central role. Yet, this heightened primacy of finance in our daily lives is only of recent vintage, no more than four decades old. How do we make sense of this financial transformation or "financialization" of the economy? How did it come about? Is rising inequality and our polarized politics an outcome of this transformation? Are there precedents to it or is this a unique moment in economic history? These are some of the questions that we will explore in this course by taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon political science, sociology, history, and anthropology. The course examines the contemporary financialization of the domestic and the international economy. To do so, it leverages conceptual frameworks from Marxist political economy, World Systems theory, and economic theory. Particular emphasis is laid on analyzing how financialization of all lives results in consolidating economic, and thus, political power in the hands of a select few who own and control the vast majority of financial assets in the world.