Rethinking economy

Abstract

Rethinking economy requires rethinking the relationship between economics and its object. The economy is a recent product of socio-technical practice, including the practice of academic economics. Previously, the term “economy” referred to ways of managing resources and exercising power. In the mid-twentieth century, it became an object of power and knowledge. Rival metrological projects brought the economy into being. The development of the modern electricity industry illustrates the kind of work involved. It required new technical processes, new forms of distribution, addressing, and monitoring, new forms of calculation that were simultaneously electrical, chemical, economic, and social. Analyses of how the economic is embedded in social ties or in cultural meanings cannot understand these intersecting projects. The projects that form the economy involve the work of economics. Economic knowledge does not represent the economy from some place outside. It participates in making sites where its facts can survive. The case of an economic research project on property rights in Peru illustrates how this happens. Economic facts were established in a world that was organized, through specific projects, such as the property titling programs of Hernando de Soto, to enable economic knowledge to be made. There is no simple divide between a virtual world of economic theory and a real world outside it. Every economic project involves multiple arrangements of the simulated and that to which it refers.