Abstract
This article addresses the manner in which neoliberal society measures vulnerability. It is not uncommon today to come across quantitative metrics assessing the vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, or investments. The concern within is what exactly such figures represent. The following elucidates frequently overlooked temporal aspects of vulnerability and responsibility among populations that practice the perpetual growth of wealth. To investigate this concern, this article offers an examination of three contemporary conceptions of vulnerability: ecological, humanitarian, and fiscal. A brief overview of the origins of the relationship between quantification and capital is offered, along with a history of modern conceptions of vulnerability. Specifically, I am concerned with how the optics of capital displace vulnerability into a perpetually hypothetical future. In analyzing the case studies of ecosystem resilience, climate refugees, and commercial insurance, my aim is to show that dominant methods of measuring vulnerability derive from and reinforce a historically situated neoliberal method of knowledge production, resulting in a paralysis of responsibility.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.Ackerman, Frank, Stanton, Elizabeth, Hope, Chris and Alberth, Stephane (2014) Did the Stern Review underestimate U.S. and global climate change? In: Ackerman, Frank and Stanton, Elizabeth (eds) Climate Change and Global Equity. London: Anthem Press, pp. 67–78 .
2.Alborn, Timothy (2009) Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 . Toronto: University of Toronto Press .
3.Anderson, E. N. (2014) Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press .
4.Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Durham: Duke University Press .
5.Biermann, Frank (2014) Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
6.Blau, Benjamin, Van Ness, Robert and Wade, Chip (2008) Capitalizing on catastrophe: Short selling insurance stocks around hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Journal of Risk and Insurance 75: 967–996 .
7.Botzen, W. J. Wouter and Van den Bergh, Jeroen C. J. M. (2012) Monetary valuation of insurance against flood risk under climate change. International Economic Review 53(3): 1005–25 .
8.Bracke, Sarah (2016) Bouncing back: Vulnerability and resistance in times of resilience. In: Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeynep and Sabsay, Leticia (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 52–75 .
9.Brighenti, Andrea Mubi (2018) The social life of measures: Conceptualizing measure–value environments. Theory, Culture & Society 35(1): 23–44 .
10.Brown, James D. (2004) Knowledge, uncertainty and physical geography: Towards the development of methodologies for questioning belief. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(3): 367–81 .
11.Butler, Judith (2016) Rethinking vulnerability and resistance. In: Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeynep and Sabsay, Leticia (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 12–27 .
12.Buxton, Nick, Hayes, Ben and George, Susan (2016) The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World . London: Pluto Press .
13.Carriquiry, Miguel and Osgood, Daniel (2012) Index insurance, probabilistic climate forecasts, and production. The Journal of Risk and Insurance 79(1): 287–99 .
14.Carter, Michael and Castillo, Marco (2005) Morals, markets and mutual insurance: Using economic experiments to study recovery from Hurricane Mitch. In: Barrett, C. B. (ed.) Exploring the Moral Dimensions of Economic Behavior . New York: Routledge .
15.Castree, Noel (2014) The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities: Extending the conversation. Environmental Humanities 5: 233–60 .
16.Clark, Gregory (2010) A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World . Princeton: Princeton University Press .
17.Collier, Benjamin, Skees, Jerry and Barnett, Barry (2009) Weather index insurance and climate change: Opportunities and challenges in lower income countries. Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance – Issues and Practice 34: 401–24 .
18.Conway, John and Kochen, Simon (2006) The strong free will theorem. Notices of the AMS 56(2): 226–232 .
19.Crosby, Alfred W. (1997) The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
20.Davis, Charles (2006) The politics of grazing on federal lands: A policy change perspective. In: Speth, James (ed.) Punctuated Equilibrium and the Dynamics of U.S. Environmental Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 232–252 .
21.De Roover, Raymond (1963) The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
22.De Roover, Raymond (1967) The scholastics, usury, and foreign exchange. The Business History Review 41(3): 257–71 .
23.Düben, Peter, McNamara, Hugh and Palmer, Tim (2014). The use of imprecise processing to improve accuracy in weather and climate prediction. Journal of Computational Physics 271: 2–18 .
24.Edwards, Paul (2013) A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
25.Ferrarese, Estelle (2009) Gabba-gabba, we accept you, one of us: Vulnerability and power in the relationship of recognition. Constellations 16(4): 604–14 .
26.Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie (2009) The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605 . Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute .
27.Gunderson, Lance, and Holling, C. S. (2001) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems . Washington, DC: Island Press .
28.Habeeb, Rebecca, Trebilco, Jessica, Wotherspoon, Simon and Johnson, Craig (2005) Determining natural scales of ecological systems. Ecological Monographs 75(4): 467–87 .
29.Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change . Oxford: Blackwell .
30.Hunt, Terry and Lipo, Carl (2012) Ecological catastrophe and collapse: The myth of ‘ecocide’ on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In: McAnany, Patricia Ann and Yoffee, Norman (eds) Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–44 .
31.Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre [IDMC] (2015) Global Overview 2015: People Internally Displaced by Disasters. Oslo: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre .
32.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] (2014) Climate Change 2014: The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
33.Jaffee, Dwight and Russell, Thomas (1997) Catastrophe insurance, capital markets, and uninsurable risks. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 64(2): 205–30 .
34.Keohane, Georgia (2016) Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Problems . New York: Columbia University Press .
35.Klein, Naomi (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate . New York: Simon & Schuster .
36.Kneuper, Robert and Yandle, Bruce (1994) Auto insurers and the air bag. The Journal of Risk and Insurance 61(1): 107–16 .
37.Knowles, Scott Gabriel and Kunreuther, Howard (2014) Troubled waters: The National Flood Insurance Program in historical perspective. Journal of Policy History 26(3): 327–353 .
38.Krawchuk, Meg and Cumming, Steve (2011) Effects of biotic feedback and harvest management on boreal forest fire activity under climate change. Ecological Applications 21(1): 122–36 .
39.Malm, Andreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming . Brooklyn: Verso .
40.Merrill, Karen (2002) The Taylor Grazing Act and the ‘vast national estate’. In: Merrill, Karen, Public Lands and Political Meaning . Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–168 .
41.Merry, Sally (2011) Measuring the world: Indicators, human rights, and global governance. Current Anthropology 52(S3): S83–95 .
42.Merry, Sally (2016) The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking . Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
43.Michel-Kerjan, Erwann and Kousky, Carolyn (2010) Come rain or shine: Evidence on flood insurance purchases in Florida. Journal of Risk and Insurance 77: 369–397 .
44.Mills, Evan (2005) Insurance in a climate of change. Science 309: 1040–4 .
45.Moore, Jason (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism . Oakland: PM Press/Kairos .
46.Morton, Timothy (2012) The Oedipal logic of ecological awareness. Environmental Humanities 1: 7–21 .
47.Nixon, Rob (2013) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
48.Paeth, Heiko, Steger, Christian and Merkenschlager, Christian (2013) Climate change – It’s all about probability. Erdkunde 67(3): 203–22 .
49.Paik, Naomi (2016) Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press .
50.Parisi, Luciana (2016) Automated thinking and the limits of reason. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16(5): 471–481 .
51.Picard, Pierre (2008) Natural disaster insurance and the equity-efficiency trade-off. The Journal of Risk and Insurance 75(1): 17–38 .
52.Pilkey, Orrin H., Pilkey-Jarvis, Linda and Pilkey, Keith C. (2016) Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change . New York: Columbia University Press .
53.Poovey, Mary (1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
54.Porter, Theodore (2000) Life insurance, medical testing, and the management of mortality. In Daston, Lorraine (ed.) Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 226–246 .
55.Puar, Jasbir (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability . Durham: Duke University Press .
56.Schwartz, Scott W. (2017) Temperature and capital: Measuring the future with quantified heat. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 8: 180–197 .
57.Sherratt, Susan and Sherratt, Andrew (1993) The growth of the Mediterranean economy in the early first millennium BC. World Archaeology 24(3): 361–78 .
58.Snir, Marc, Wisniewski, Robert, Abraham, Jacob, Adve, Sarita and Bachi, Saurabh (2014) Addressing failures in exascale computing. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 28(2): 129–173 .
59.Stengers, Isabelle (2010) Cosmopolitics, Vol. 1 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press .
60.Stern, Nicholas (2013) The structure of economic modeling of the potential impacts of climate change: Grafting gross underestimation of risk onto already narrow science models. Journal of Economic Literature 51(3): 838–59 .
61.Thompson, E. P. (1967) Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past & Present 38: 56–97 .
62.Walker, Brian and Salt, David (2006) Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World . London: Island Press .
63.Walsh, Adrian and Lynch, Tony (2008) The Morality of Money: An Exploration in Analytic Philosophy . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan .
64.Wuerthner, George (2006) Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy . Washington, DC: Island Press .
65.Zaloom, Caitlin (2009) How to read the future: The yield curve, affect, and financial prediction. Public Culture 21(2): 245–268 .
66.Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska (1996) The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism . Albany: State University of New York Press .
67.Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska (2013) Feminist reflections on vulnerability: Disrespect, obligation, action. Substance 42(3): 67–84 .