The Known Economy ― Romantics, Rationalists, and the Making of a World Scale

The Known Economy shows that international economic institutions, chiefly the International Monetary Fund, have been enormously successful cultural innovators, creating a persuasive system of meanings including the very category of a "world economy."

Fundamental assumptions about gender, sexuality, and population that underlie the data-described "national economy" have been universalized into the "world economy" that is now widely taken for granted by both celebrants and critics.

This rhetorical and practical success has costs. Because it assumes coherent and bounded nations, nuclear heterosexual households, and an international order free of consequential power, it excludes transnational families and communities, a wide range of kinship and materially-important association, and the operation of power on an international scale. Most fundamentally, baked into the data is the assumption of a clear, stark division between family and market, love and self-interest. This limits our ability to perceive material activities that cross boundaries between home and market.

Colin Danby received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997, and is currently Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell. He has published articles in Post Keynesian theory, Feminist Economics, and Economic Anthropology.