Product Description

While trillions of dollars came and went in the stock market boom of the 1990s, the image of 'every man and woman a CEO' may turn out to be the era's lasting legacy. Business news, once reserved to specialized papers or sections of the larger news of the day, came to the forefront in cable television and in cultural images of how ordinary people, through the internet and other avenues could not only master their financial life, but move money and equity around with the ease of a financial titan. "Financialization of Daily Life" looks at how this transformation occurred, and how it is just now becoming a significant, and troubling, aspect of our political and cultural life. Randy Martin takes us through all of the aspects of our 'financialization'. He examines how the shift in economic life arose not only from changes in culture, but also from new policy priorities that emphasize controlling inflation over promoting growth. He offers a close reading of self-help literature that teaches parents how to rear financially literate children and to instruct adults in the fundamentals of fiscal management. He examines just what a society that treats financial investment as a national past time really looks like, and how that society is transforming the world. In a country rocked by scandals in accounting and banking, the identification ordinary citizens make with, and the risk with which they engage in, the stock market calls into question the very basis of our economic system. Randy Martin spells out in clear terms the implications our financial doings - and undoing - have for the way we organize our lives, and, especially, our money. Author note: Randy Martin is Professor of Art and Public Policy and Associate Dean of Faculty and Interdisciplinary Programs at New York University. He is the author and editor of seven books, including, most recently, "On Your Marx: Rethinking Socialism and the Left".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475332 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"By 'financialization,' Martin refers to the influence of financial calculations and judgments, and his valuable starting point is that financialization, having fundamentally altered American business over the past four decades, is well on its way to doing the same to other areas of U.S. life...His themes are superb. Martin shows how economic change operates as much at the level of lived experience as it does at the level of ideology and his arguments should interest anyone concerned with the impact of financialization on recent art and criticism." --Chris Newfield, Dept. of English, University of California, Santa Barbara "[T]his is an important book which deserves to be widely read." --The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare "[Randy Martin] must be applauded for his many courageous forays into the literature of financial self-management, and for the often entertainingly grotesque examples he has brought back from those expeditions." --Science and Society

From the Publisher
How investment banking and playing the market moved from Wall Street to Main Street

From the Inside Flap
"By 'financialization,' Martin refers to the influence of financial calculations and judgments, and his valuable starting point is that financialization, having fundamentally altered American business over the past four decades, is well on its way to doing the same to other areas of U.S. life....His themes are superb. Martin shows how economic change operates as much at the level of lived experience as it does at the level of ideology and his arguments should interest anyone concerned with the impact of financialization on recent art and criticism."
—Chris Newfield, Dept. of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Customer Reviews

Obfuscation of daily life
The book basically explains how economic-political ("ecopolinomic") attempts by the big financial businesses (global banks and other financial institutions) to get more people to part with their money (borrowed from or stored with banks).

I give it 3 out of 5 stars for the following reasons:
Although enlightening, the author fills too many pages trying to sound smart with sound bytes. His style and vocabulary is also not suited to the general reader, for one needs a dictionary on hand for unusual words on about every 2nd page. Pity, because the topic needs not appear sophisticated to be informative or to appear profound.

A good read
This is an important book. Its thesis, that daily life has been colonised by financial circuits of capital, is an important one to explore. The book is accessible to a wider readership.