Mileiconomics: Beating Inflation in an Illiberal Economy
April 28th | 3:00pm | Coble Hall, Room 306
Join Prof. Sarah Muir as she delves into the pragmatics of illiberal investment, exploring how people build and safeguard economic value when traditional financial institutions fail.
In contemporary Argentina, cryptocurrency scandals are a mainstay of public culture. The most recent involved President Milei's promotion of a memecoin called "$LIBRA" which left tens of thousands of people holding worthless digital tokens and which has spurred judicial investigations and political consequences that are still unfolding. In this talk, I argue that we can better understand the significance of cryptocurrency scandals such as Milei's memecoin by approaching them not primarily as the product of high-tech, AI-driven finance but, more fundamentally, as the close cousin of a wide range of mundane investment practices that everyday people pursue in an effort to stay afloat in a highly unstable and inflationary economy. In other words, this talk is about the pragmatics and metapragmatics of illiberal investment: When institutions of liberal political economy are felt to be lacking, incomplete, or insufficient, how do people try to build and safeguard economic value? What ideas, intuitions, and commitments underpin those attempts? And, what can those practical and ideational logics tell us about illiberalism more broadly and about the appeal of figures such as Milei, in Argentina and elsewhere?
About the Speaker
Sarah Muir is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Programs at City College and of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also the Director of the International and Global Studies Program at City College. Her research, situated at the intersection of linguistic, political-economic, and historical anthropology, examines issues of obligation, evaluation, and financial ethics. She is the author of Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and is currently working on a project that explores how people navigate monetary uncertainty.