The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? In Money Talks, UCI sociologist Nina Bandelj and co-authors from Yale and Princeton offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. The collection brings together international experts from multiple disciplines—sociology, economics, history, law, anthropology, political science, and philosophy—to propose fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. They tackle five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations?

Below, Bandelj addresses some of these and other questions about the new book and money’s profound social potential.

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Q: Of the five questions your book explores, which issue do you think is most important today?

Not necessarily the most important, but certainly the one that I’ve studied most extensively, is the question about the role of social relationships, emotions and morals in what people do with money. There is a common assumption that money is cold and rational, and that it corrupts relations. We’ve all heard that “money can’t buy you happiness,” or that “money is the root of all evil.” One of the central arguments that Money Talks makes, building on sizable sociological and anthropological research, is that money does not equal to exploitation or corruption. Such blanket statements do more harm than not because they prevent us from learning about multiple forms and meanings of money. Instead of jumping to gloomy conclusions, in Money Talks, we ask, when, and in which forms, money enhances moral concerns or helps to advance justice, and when it threatens or deepens inequality. We look at monies, plural, rather than money, singular. And once we see multiple monies, we can uncover how people negotiate their social and economic relations to match them with appropriate payments, a process we call relational work.

 

Q: What was one of the most unexpected explanations you came across for how money is created and used?

Let me tell you about “policy money” because it is so closely related to how this research on multiple monies actually influences people’s lives. One very consequential way for governments to fight inequality is to provide direct financial assistance to the poor. Different countries have different social welfare programs, but those are rarely determined by economic efficiency. (Why otherwise would we have such plurality of programs?) Rather, what governments do (or not do) to fight poverty is strongly linked to deeply held values of whether governments should intervene into individuals’ lives and who is deserving of governmental assistance. In the U.S. the mere word “welfare” seems to invoke strong opposition. So it is not surprising that welfare cash transfers never received much political nor public support. But there are different policy monies that are more acceptable. Our book reports on research on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) by Jennifer Sykes, Katrin Kriz, Kathryn Edin, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which was developed by the Clinton administration, and had bipartisan support, is a tax credit, administered by the IRS, given to poor working families as a refund. For instance, a single mother with two children, with earnings a bit below the poverty line ($19,337 in 2016) would get around $5,000 in EITC. For those receiving the money, the fact that it is not welfare but earned income tax credit makes the world of difference. It is a more dignified transfer, making recipients feel that they belong to this country, rather than being discarded by it. Because it arrived in one big sum, and as part of a tax refund -- rather than in small monthly increments from the welfare office -- recipients were counting the days in anticipation for what felt like “Christmas” and were making plans about everything that they could potentially do with the money. Although EITC provided important financial relief to pay bills or pay off some debts, the recipients would also allocate some for modest discretionary consumption for the family and children, enhancing feelings of dignity and self-worth, and giving them a breather from day-to-day financial struggles.

 

Q: How did the book’s premise come about and where does this fit into your overall research agenda?

Viviana Zelizer, one of my co-editors, published a terrific book in 1994 called The Social Meaning of Money. We began assembling the Money Talks volume after a symposium at Yale University that celebrated the 20^th anniversary of The Social Meaning of Money’s publication. We wanted to gather some cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that has been inspired by Zelizer’s premise that social relations and meanings shape how money is used and for what purpose. This is very closely tied to my own preoccupation to dispel common myths about not just money, but economy more broadly. One such assumption is that the economic sphere is separate from the social sphere, and that it functions with the immutable supply and demand rationale. I disagree. Just think about it. We care dearly about who is pictured on the $10 bill. Business people will tell you that they need to cultivate relationships to close investment deals. And why on earth do we expend hundreds of thousands of dollars on our children? I say that it is because we, people, with our visceral emotions, moral judgments and social connections are the centerpiece of economy. My love for money comes from this central premise, and pushes me to continue to uncover how social forces influence economy.

 

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Nina Bandelj is professor of sociology and equity advisor to the dean of social sciences at UC Irvine. Money Talks is her sixth co-authored and/or edited book. Frederick F. Wherry is professor of sociology and codirector of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Viviana A. Zelizer is the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

Money Talks is available online from Princeton University Press.