Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)

May 14, 2024

Dr. Liliana Doganova discusses how discounting shapes our view of the future in business and policy. She explores the history of discounting in forestry, its impact on investment decisions, and the challenges it presents in the bio-pharmaceutical industry. The podcast highlights the need for a socio-political understanding of discounting and its implications for decision-making.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

Unraveling the Enigma of Discounting the Future

03:13 • 16min

Exploring the Evolution of Capitalization and Value in Relation to the Future

19:25 • 5min

Evolution of Discounting in Forestry

24:36 • 15min

Evolution of Discounting Practices and Criticism in Business Decision Making

39:17 • 4min

Discounting Impact on Investment Decisions

42:57 • 4min

Navigating Uncertainty: Challenges of Discounting in Bio-Pharmaceutical Industry

47:23 • 14min

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.

Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Dr. Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalisation of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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