The persuasive power of money 12 January 2007

Money talks, it’ll tell you a story
Money talks, says strange things
Money talks very loudly
You’d be surprised the friends you can buy
with small change

J.J. Cale “Money Talks” (song)

In this essay, I try to account for money’s power to influence our minds and social relations. It would be easy, but misleading to argue that money’s ability to persuade is a universal characteristic. The way money persuades is historically relative – very different for Adam Smith than for Maynard Keynes and even more for us who live in the digital revolution and the expansion of virtual society it entails. Moreover, the fetishism that grants money a quasi-independent role in human affairs needs to be exposed for what it is. People make and use money, not the other way round; but sometimes it feels like we are more acted upon than acting. Money conveys meanings at the same time as it negates them; it has – or is thought to have — both structure and agency at once.

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A liberal revolution for Africa? 8 January 2007

(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8^th January 2007)

I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal economy’ concept (Hart 1973, 2006). But the real sources of the idea were the mostly poor Ghanaians who took in a young English student and allowed me to share something of their lives. Everything I have done since has been inspired by that formative period spent here in Ghana. In what follows, I will not dwell at length on the informal economy concept as such or on the experience that gave rise to it.Rather, I will take advantage of the seminar series’ invitation to consider the next fifty years in this jubilee year of Ghana’s independence. If the ‘informal economy’ concept drew attention to a wide variety of hitherto invisible practices, at this stage we need to investigate more closely what these practices stand for positively. I will argue that they constitute a dramatic expansion of urban commerce, ‘the market’, which just might be the foundation for an economic revolution in Africa during the decades that lie ahead. (more…)