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Can I read The Economization of Life on EtoBox?

The Economization of Life by Murphy, Michelle is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Economization of Life about?

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In __The Economization of Life__, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

Who reads The Economization of Life?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Murphy, Michelle
Publisher
Duke University Press Books
Published
2017
Language
EN
ISBN
9780822363453
Category
nonfiction
Subjects
Economics, Political Science, Social Science
Rating
4.1 / 5 (17 ratings)
Updated
2026-03-14

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