For a recent issue of Economy and Society, Daniel Neyland discusses 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 article. An excerpt appears below:

“For Doganova, discounting provides a key means to grasp futures in the present to give us the chance to act. She suggests that ‘Discounting is a way of determining the value of something in order to set its price. To do so, discounting looks at the future: it contemplates the flows of costs and revenues that the thing being valued is likely to generate over its lifetime and translates the value of these future costs and revenues in the present by applying to them a ‘discount rate’. The discount rate reflects the risk that the future value may not be fully achieved. In this way, a heavier discount rate might be applied to a future outcome that is more distant in time and thus might be said to represent a more significant risk. Placing a value on the future outcome enables investors to decide if the likely return is worth pursuing, or in other situations, may enable policymakers to decide if the cost of an intervention is worth pursuing.”