Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter in the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:
Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University, working at the intersection of economic sociology and Science and Technology Studies. Doganova spoke with Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter about her recent book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024), which explores the links between valuation and temporality through a historical sociology of the technique of discounting the future.
Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter: Besides “discounting,” the word that seems to recur the most often in your book is some version of “crisis.” You present your book as a conscious political intervention in the present as well as a historical and theoretical one. This seems to be performed by your conceptualization of discounting as both a political theory of action and an economic theory of value. Given that this book consciously intervenes in a moment of urgency, could you share what brought you to this topic originally and how these crises or your understanding of them have evolved during your research?
Liliana Doganova: The book opens with a scene of crisis: the forest fires that devastated France in the summer of 2022. It introduces discounting through its implications in the broader climate crisis. Discounting is an economic technique that derives the value of things (including corporate investment projects, public policies, or even human life or nature) by projecting the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future; flows that occur at different points in time are made commensurate by being “discounted” to their so-called “present value”: the more distant a flow in the future, the less its value in the present.
More here.
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