Kathleen [sic, should be Katharina] Pistor: The Code of Capital — John Emerson

In the aftermath of the 2007 crash Katharina Pistor“sought to discover what lay behind finance’s stupendous expansion in recent decades, and what accounted for its steep fall”. Her specialty is law, and her book is first of all about how “law has been put at the service of capital”, especially during the last two centuries (and above all in recent decades). Beyond that, she argues that capital is the product of law: “Most observers treat law as a sideshow, when it is the very cloth from which capital is cut.” (Some things in this book remind me of points made in Walter Karp’s 1993 Indispensable Enemies about the role of government in capital creation).

Pistor’s book is pretty demanding, but it was written for a non-specialist public and is one of the best works of “popularization” that I have ever read. It’s well-organized and well-written enough that rather than reviewing it, I just cite key passages in hopes that people will want to read the whole thing....

This type of analysis emphasizes the institutional basis of economics and finance and casts shade on the assumption of naturalism that underlies conventional economic assumptions and its approach to model-building. MMT is grounded in institutional economics and like other heterodox schools it rejects the naturalistic assumption in economics for an historical approach.

Epigrues
Kathleen [sic, should be Katharina] Pistor: The Code of Capital
John Emerson