Class description:
The Nobel Prize winning economist and historian Robert Shiller calls finance the “life-blood of our economy.” So what happens when that life-blood dries up, as it did in 2008? For many of us, finance, like our capillary system, usually functions behind the scenes. But when a crisis or a panic hits, it suddenly becomes clear how badly we need to understand this crucial system. As critic David Zimmerman writes, panics expose “cultural and economic dynamics that were invisible under normal conditions” (2). Panics spur novelists and other cultural producers to think about and depict economic realities, like “seismologists converging on the epicenter of a recent earthquake” (2). This class addresses the intersection of the culture and the economy during such convergences. However, our central thesis is not simply that the culture responds to financial crises, but that the culture also plays a crucial role in economy.
Financial markets emerge from a complex system, a set of corporations and institutions, which have a culture of their own. How do we, and how should we, understand the system of finance? How does the wider culture react to, and even influence, the world of finance?
Economists argue about whether bubbles exist and what causes them. But most critics agree that the “animal spirits,” as Keynes famously called human emotions, influence the economy. Most people understand that when, for example, housing prices spiral upwards, out of sync with income levels, mass psychology must play some role. Asking what happens in the culture during financial crises is both a cultural and an economic question.
Some of the questions that literature, films and televisions shows help us analyze are: How do people relate to and understand housing debt and home ownership? Why have there been no prosecutions since the (much larger) 2008 crisis? (The government prosecuted high level actors during the Savings and Loan crisis, the Enron crisis, and even after the dot.com bust.) Who makes the financial markets, and how does the culture depict and understand those people? Who do we imagine is responsible for what happens?
Financial markets, derivatives, and other instruments now hold many of our life savings and retirement funds. By analyzing what books and movies show us that we feel about risk and finance, we come to a better understanding of how the large scale structures that distribute risk and regulate finance perpetuate themselves.
On the one hand, this class aims to give students a clear, concrete and historically specific understanding of what happens during a financial crisis, with a specific focus on the most recent crisis in 2008. At the same time, we hope to both clarify and complicate the intersection between the economy and the culture. The driving thesis is that in order to understand the culture, you must understand the finance, and in order to understand the finance, you must also understand the culture.
The Nobel Prize winning economist and historian Robert Shiller calls finance the “life-blood of our economy.” So what happens when that life-blood dries up, as it did in 2008? For many of us, finance, like our capillary system, usually functions behind the scenes. But when a crisis or a panic hits, it suddenly becomes clear how badly we need to understand this crucial system. As critic David Zimmerman writes, panics expose “cultural and economic dynamics that were invisible under normal conditions” (2). Panics spur novelists and other cultural producers to think about and depict economic realities, like “seismologists converging on the epicenter of a recent earthquake” (2). This class addresses the intersection of the culture and the economy during such convergences. However, our central thesis is not simply that the culture responds to financial crises, but that the culture also plays a crucial role in economy.
Financial markets emerge from a complex system, a set of corporations and institutions, which have a culture of their own. How do we, and how should we, understand the system of finance? How does the wider culture react to, and even influence, the world of finance?
Economists argue about whether bubbles exist and what causes them. But most critics agree that the “animal spirits,” as Keynes famously called human emotions, influence the economy. Most people understand that when, for example, housing prices spiral upwards, out of sync with income levels, mass psychology must play some role. Asking what happens in the culture during financial crises is both a cultural and an economic question.
Some of the questions that literature, films and televisions shows help us analyze are: How do people relate to and understand housing debt and home ownership? Why have there been no prosecutions since the (much larger) 2008 crisis? (The government prosecuted high level actors during the Savings and Loan crisis, the Enron crisis, and even after the dot.com bust.) Who makes the financial markets, and how does the culture depict and understand those people? Who do we imagine is responsible for what happens?
Financial markets, derivatives, and other instruments now hold many of our life savings and retirement funds. By analyzing what books and movies show us that we feel about risk and finance, we come to a better understanding of how the large scale structures that distribute risk and regulate finance perpetuate themselves.
On the one hand, this class aims to give students a clear, concrete and historically specific understanding of what happens during a financial crisis, with a specific focus on the most recent crisis in 2008. At the same time, we hope to both clarify and complicate the intersection between the economy and the culture. The driving thesis is that in order to understand the culture, you must understand the finance, and in order to understand the finance, you must also understand the culture.