The speculative turn in IVF: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility

Although egg freezing has received much scholarly attention, the pivotal role of financialisation in the fertility (preservation) sector remains understudied. This article discusses how processes of financialisation have instigated a step-change in the organisation of contemporary US IVF and why egg freezing is at the heart of a wider consolidating trend in the sector. The financialisation of fertility, in this context, references the financial investments in a future in which ever more women freeze their eggs, the role of capital markets in establishing new clinical and commercial infrastructures through which egg freezing becomes accessible and the role of financial products in shaping both the stories and the streamlining of fertility treatments. Together, these developments signal a shift from reproduction to fertility in IVF, in which treatment is not aimed at having a child at present, but rather at the proactive management of a more speculative fertility throughout the life course.Alan Turing Institut

The inversion of the ‘really big trade-off’:Homeownership and pensions in long-run perspective

The hypothesis of a trade-off between homeownership and welfare state provision, first proposed by Jim Kemeny around 1980, is a foundational claim in the political economy of housing. However, the evidence for this hypothesis is unclear at both macro and micro levels. This paper examines the link between welfare and homeownership at the macro level using new long-run data and a multilevel modelling approach. It shows that the negative cross-sectional correlation between homeownership and public welfare provision observed in the earliest available data disappears and becomes neutral by the 1980s and possibly positive subsequently. Within-country trajectories vary, but are significantly positive in more countries than significantly negative, suggesting that in some contexts welfare and homeownership are complements rather than competitors. The paper posits a dual ratchet effect mechanism in both pension benefits and homeownership capable of producing this inversion, and further suggests that rising public indebtedness and the debt-stabilising effects of welfare states may account for the emergence of complementarity in the pension‒homeownership relationship. The latter supports the hypothesis that some countries have avoided the trade-off by ‘buying time’ on credit markets.Abstract Literature and theory Data and methods The trade-off in the long run: descriptive findings Multivariate analysis Country trajectories: buying time? Conclusion Supplemental material Reference

The Crisis in Market Regulation

Held in conjunction with ST 600 Market Failure, Famines and Crises, Dr. Greta Krippner is the second lecturer in the Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series. Her lecture is entitled, The Crisis in Market Regulation. She finds that state policies created the conditions conducive to financialization that solved some current policy dilemmas of the 1970s and 1980s, but created major weaknesses that would ultimately fail in the new millennium. Financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state\u27s attempts to solve other problems, especially the stagnation and deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s, the encouragement of foreign capital in the US economy, and large trade imbalances caused by direct foreign investment. Dr. Krippner is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her latest publication is Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance Harvard University Press, 2012

Toward a Sociology of Contract

Economic sociology has neglected contract as an institutional foundation for market relations. It has also given inadequate attention to the role of forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality in constituting market exchange. We argue that these omissions share common origins in the status/contract division that figured prominently in nineteenth-century sociological and legal thinking. In excavating these origins, we trace two alternative routes to “socializing the economy” associated with sociological and sociolegal traditions, respectively. The sociological approach rests on a dichotomous understanding of “status” and “contract,” with the result that social (“status”) relations are seen as regulating market exchange from the outside. By contrast, Legal Realists treat status and contract as copresent elements of social organization. Because status and contract are intertwined, they operate through the internal constitution of power and inequality in the bargaining relationship. We conclude by considering how insights from sociology and Legal Realism might be productively joined in analyzing the labor contract

The Politics of Financialization

The route to political studies of financialization RR: If you could you come back on the very beginning of your academic career, how did you come to study financialization and what was your perception of the distinctive US fields of research involved in financial issues? In the 1990s, social studies of finance were still in their early years. GK: When I began graduate studies in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of interest in trying to understand the proliferation of apparently new forms of org..

On Kimberly Kay Hoang's, Dealing in Desire. Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2015

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