I only recently discovered that Donald MacKenzie has been contributing for the London Review of Books. Even though the forum is not strictly academic, I highly recommend these essays for anybody who is serious about the idea that institutions and mundane material means of trading matter. MacKenzie’s analytic grasp of the social ontology behind the recent financial turmoil should also inspire philosophers thinking about social ontology to see if something new can be learned and whether their philosophical insights have any bearing on current affairs. Brilliant stuff as usual and I can’t wait for his new book Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed to come out.
Click here for MacKenzie’s LRB pages and here for drafts on his home-page.
Another essay by MacKenzie left me thinking about certain blind spots in the way we think and theorize about societal mechanisms - what might be called invisible cogs and wheels. MacKenzie lays out how the Libor, a set of key interest rates that is crucial in the constitution of some pretty hefty institutional facts, is in the end worked out daily by just two guys in an open-plan office in London. Although these guys do have a backup crew in the case of emergency (a terrorist attack), the fact that the global resource allocation mechanism is dependent on such an exactly localizable component, that there is so little systemic redundancy, is, at least to my mind, pretty startling.
On a distantly related note, I think there is a pretty important blind spot in social and political philosophy as well as public discourse: the role of rating agencies. Again, it is the current mess that best highlights the role of these institutions in influencing where and how fast resources flow. It is quite interesting that apparently just two institutions (Moody’s and S&P) have a virtual monopoly in steering the bulk of global resources and that they do this pretty much under the radar of political thought.
