Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion – from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.
The hard-headed critique ‘EXPULSIONS. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy’ updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations – assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project.
Saskia Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today’s financial &linstruments&r is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment
