The Ritual of Capitalization

Blair Fix
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Blair Fix: York University

No cf5xv, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: For more than a century, political economists have sought to understand the nature of capital. The prevailing wisdom is that there must be something ‘real’ — some productive capacity — that underpins capitalized values. This thinking, I argue, is a mistake. Building on Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of capital as power, I argue that capitalization is an ideology. It is a quantitative ritual for converting earnings into present value. Although the ritual is arbitrary, it gives rise to astonishing empirical regularities, reviewed here.

Date: 2021-08-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-isf and nep-pke
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:cf5xv

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/cf5xv

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