A Personal Tribute to Nigel Dodd 1965-2022

I've just been at the Finance and Society Conference at City University in London for the past couple of days. It was the first 'in person' conference I've attended since 2019 because of the pandemic. I'm not 'in' academia. I'm not doctoral student, researcher, lecturer, or professor. In my day-to-day life I've little contact with anything that resembles university or academic life. Currently, I drive a van to earn my living. When I am lucky enough to attend a conference focusing on my area of interest I find it wholly invigorating. I guess if you're in academia you might get used to being able to chat about the weird, wonderful and esoteric stuff you're reading or thinking about. I don't have that in my day to day life. So it's brilliant to be able to be a pretend-academic for a couple of days every now and then.

Money Wisdom #502

"There are two basic models of the libidinal economy of revolutionary movements, which we might characterise as the Freudian and the Reichian, or the petit-bourgeois and the utopian-socialist, or the Calvinist and the Keynesian models - the former based on a vision of (libidinal) spending as depletion or loss, the latter on a vision of spending as generating (Libidinal) wealth."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.157

Money Wisdom #501

 "Neoliberalism recasts the moral/immoral distinction as a rational/irrational one, reinforcing the bonds between economic and psychiatric rationality. As national economies continue to lurch between inflation and recession in the twenty-first century, the question of how much credit-fuelled spending is rational or irrational, healthy or unhealthy, for any nation at any given moment continues to divide economists, just as the question of how much shopping might be rational or irrational, healthy or pathological, for any individual divides psychiatrists."

David Bennett The Currency of Desire (2016) p.121