In a recent review for The Boston Review, Kevin P. Donovan discussing Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology by Liliana Doganova. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:
“…in sociologist Liliana Doganova’s recent, wide-ranging exploration of financial accounting, Discounting the Future… she sharply demonstrates, valuation is a “political technology.” Neither a private affair nor an objective lens, it is a tool that produces inequalities of wealth, shapes how property is owned, and determines where investments are made. “No value exists independently from the instrument through which it is measured,” she writes. The routing of Tanzanian socialism and self-reliance through arcane debates about accounting techniques is a case in point.”