2021-2022

זהו פרק פותח לספר חדש, שבוחן את הפיכתו של האינדיבידואל , כלומר, להשקפת עולם סדורה ומשנה מדינית, המשתיתה את חיי ל-"איזם" הכלל על זכויות הפרט. מדובר בצעד רדיקלי, שהפך את היוצרות ותוך כדי כונן את הליברליזם. זכים מתחכה אחר התפתחות זאת באמצעות הקריאה ב"דמוקרטיה באמריקה" ),1835 1840(, מאת אלקסיס דה טוקויל, ספר ההגות החשוב של המאה התשע-עשרה שטבע לראשונה את המונח ״אינדיבידואליזם״.

Reconstructing the Federal Reserve System’s first decade, this paper provides a genealogy of modern central banks as managers of ‘the economy’. The macroeconomic central banking modality, we argue, emerged out of the recombinatorial problem-solving process policymakers engaged in to create a central bank that could survive the contentious American civic epistemology. We first develop a theory of interstitial government that conceptualizes the hybridity of central banks’ governance architecture in terms of ‘embedded autonomy’. We then reconstruct the repurposing of open market operations into the policy device that made the System’s transformation into a macroeconomic manager possible. We demonstrate that modern central banks’ hybridity as well as their strategies to manage it invite political controversy. 

In comparing tax systems across developed countries, scholars generally stress dif- ferences. We point to a relationship common to all countries when we consider the link between tax rates and income percentile rather than the link between tax rates and income level. Across all countries, this relationship is (1) remarkably linear, (2) with a uniform slope of 3%. The additional tax that one has to pay when climbing in the income ladder is therefore the same everywhere. We call this common shape of taxation the ’Law of rank’. We establish this stylized fact for 22 OECD countries over 17 years, using LIS dataset supplemented with OECD tax data. Combined with the different pretax income distributions and the various average tax rates across developed economies, this ’Law of rank’ has important theoretical implications, as it allows us to predict the well-known properties of existing tax schedules: (i) Local progressivity in taxation is higher when income inequality is low (i.e. when the gap in income from one fractile to the next is small); (ii) Marginal tax rates are increasing in income, before to decrease for top incomes in every country – yet at different paces; (iii) Global pro- gressivity in taxation (Kakwani disproportionality measure) decreases with the country average tax rate.

Under the pressure of work’s devaluation and the state’s retrenchment, men and women in Spain struggle to provide for their dependents by managing extended family resources to meet their family needs. In Spain’s finance-led economy, these resources become the main axis of inequality. Drawing on my fieldwork in Madrid, I show that men and women understand themselves in terms of this responsibility, internalizing capitalist pressures on social reproduction as a family matter. This responsibility supersedes gender inequalities and dilutes the grievances to which exploited waged work and unwaged domestic work might give rise. Instead of the refusal of a responsibility that used to be socialized being a principled and political stance, then, it is dismissed as selfish.  

What explains the resilience of neoliberal policies in advanced capitalist democracies in the decade that followed the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and ended with the Covid-19 pandemic? Most studies of this topic have pointed at the various factors – like powerful financial interests and electoral preferences – that stand behind the lack of “political will” to advance non-neoliberal economic reforms. This paper contributes to these studies by suggesting that even when non-neoliberal political will is present, the discursive and institutional dominance of neoliberal ideas of government (NIGs) has restrained and mitigated non-neoliberal reform. NIGs, which focus on appropriate decision-making processes rather than on appropriate policies per se, have guided the depoliticization of economic decision-making by delegating policymaking discretion to non-elected bodies and restricting policymaking discretion of elected officials by applying rules-based frameworks. I argue that the discursive and institutional dominance of NIGs in the post-2008 context has limited the translation of non-neoliberal political will into policy reforms. This argument is demonstrated through an in-depth process-tracing analysis of cases in which neoliberal policies were maintained despite the presence of non-neoliberal political will, which took place in Sweden (2014-2018) and Israel (2011-2019).

Across history, monetary systems are always hierarchical. Why? We propose a political theory of money as an answer. To account for hierarchy, we build a theory of types of social relations into a credit theory of money. We posit two broad types of social relations, political and economic. Balance sheets “mutualised” or interlocked by political contracts are more “robust” (costlier to liquidate) than those economically mutualised and thereby issue better, more money-like liabilities. Different types of social relations lead to different types of mutualisation. Types of mutualisation, in turn, combine with scale to outline a space of monetary variation and hierarchy. Balance sheets robustly mutualised at greater scale issue better money than those less robustly mutualised and at smaller scale. All politics is local, engendering further variation between politically-mutualised balance sheets. This space of variation is also a space of varied forms of hybridity as public and private balance sheets interlock differently under particular political settlements. We take up several case studies located at different points in this space.

Why would two countries that share cultural norms challenging bodily giving demonstrate a contrastive pattern in regulating bodily giving—creating legal markets for one body part while prohibiting such possibilities for the other? This study tackles this question by comparing the regulations over living kidney donation and gamete donation in Singapore and Taiwan. While Singapore allows kidney recipients to directly reimburse their living donors, Taiwan restricts living donors to be blood-related to the recipients and prohibits any compensation. On the contrary, Taiwan opens the door for monetary compensation for gamete donors, but such compensation is prohibited in Singapore. Through archival and interview research, I demonstrate that these juxtaposed policy outcomes have been shaped by the different governing bureaus that prioritize which problems to resolve and the healthcare designs that determine stakeholders’ interests in lobbying for monetary incentives. While economic aspirations motivate legalized compensation, political anxieties over the cost to manage transactions and the “genes” of the nation lead to the prohibition of donor compensation. The analysis shows the incoherent agendas within welfare regimes, fleshes out the selection of cultural narratives during policymaking, and exemplifies the seemingly opposite means of neoliberal governance.