Miranda Joseph

For the most part, I found this very challenging to read.  While I have taken several entry level business classes here at University of Maryland, none of them took the time to address how the concepts related to society.  I learned some of the principles Miranda Joseph emphasizes in the introduction of her book that pertained to basic accounting with a few larger applications.  However, I found this writing to be too verbose and difficult to relate to fully comprehend.  Because this was such a challenging read for me, I would like to outline some of the ideas that I gathered from the introduction of the book, and then try to detail some of the information I found interesting from the following chapters.  I would like to start with her emphasis on accountability.  The concept of accountability means that people "will do the right thing (act responsibly) or be punished."  I believe the concept of economic entities being accountable for their actions is central to her underlying argument about how debt is incurred by society.  Accountability allows the social world to interact with the financial world.  When an economic crisis occurs, the media wants to figure out who was accountable.  This shows that all people are affected by the dynamic economy, and "high finance" becomes palpable for all people.  The reality of economic crisis is most evident in strike debt.  Debt creates a world for individuals to be safe from poverty, or rather, safe from financial institutions that accrue capital from the debts of others.  Financial institutions manipulate debt against particular communities in the pursuit of accruing more capital.  Miranda Joseph uses the example of the Wells Fargo branch in Silver Spring Maryland in this point.  In this case, Wells Fargo targeted African American consumers by hiring exclusively African American employees to solicit loans.  Baltimore filed a complaint against the company because its program relied on stereotypes of African American communities in order to exploit debtors.  This example feeds into the notion that financial institutions have the power to polarize and exploit entire communities in the process of accruing capital.  Baltimore forced Wells Fargo to be morally accountable in this lawsuit, as exploiting particular communities creates an almost eternal state of debt for the exploited.  When Miranda Joseph focuses on women as a community exploited by neoliberalism, she explores the state of welfare and poverty for women.  She argues the entrepreneurial subjectivity relies on gender norms.  Social norms are dramatized by the economy when financial institutions assume women have poor financial management skills.  Women must be controlled by men in their financial practices for fear that they are incapable of maintaining balance.  Welfare perpetuates female inability to control their money, as they need to rely on a government system in order to support herself and a family if she has one.  The problem is that women are not encouraged to be independent of their own finances.  I would like to relate this to an article I read recently about motherhood.  In this article, it is argued that motherhood is not biologically instinctive, but a learned desire.  Because women are forced by society to become mothers, and only mothers, men are expected to earn wages to support the family.  Women who are both mothers and professionals experience more scrutiny if they slip up in raising their children, yet men are applauded merely for being their for the uprearing of their children at all.  In this way, women who contribute to the economy in other ways than being a mother are scorned.  Men, then, take control over the entire economy and create a system of welfare in which a woman can never be independent of men.