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Ben Spies-Butcher and Gareth Bryant, ‘Seeing like a bank, calculating like a state’

by Gareth Bryant on September 20, 2018

Ben Spies-Butcher and Gareth Bryant, ‘Seeing like a bank, calculating like a state’

Gareth Bryant | September 20, 2018

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Department of Political Economy Seminar Series

Seeing like a bank, calculating like a state

Ben Spies-Butcher (Macquarie) and Gareth Bryant (Sydney)

When: 4.00-5.30 Thursday 20th September

Where: Merewether 498, University of Sydney

Abstract 

This paper explores changes in the ways advanced capitalist states manage and govern social policy. It builds on the financialisation literature to focus on how financial ways of calculating are being incorporated into the policy process via accounting techniques. The paper uses a series of examples to highlight how states have begun to ‘think’ like a financial actor. However, unlike more conventional understandings of financialisation, which involve the state externalising social risks to private financial markets, we focus on how these processes remain embedded within the fiscal powers of states, reshaping how policy is designed, implemented and evaluated. We identify a number of important common tendencies: to shift power from line to central agencies; to construct policy issues as technical problems requiring ‘evidence’; and to reduce social challenges to quantifiable outcomes, which in turn imply price-like trade-offs.  Each of these tendencies is consistent with dominant understandings of neoliberal governance and the demise of politics, however we argue that within social policy, politics has not disappeared, but has rather been reconstructed. The presentation is the beginning of a larger project, and so we end by raising questions to guide future research and open debate.

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Author: Gareth Bryant

Gareth Bryant is a political economist at the University of Sydney. He works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and as economist-in-residence with the Sydney Policy Lab.

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  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)