Explains why the usual American solution to economic problems, the free market, is inadequate to either explain how the economy really works or solve its problems.

Climate change is a time horizon problem. Economics proposes a carbon tax and leaving the rest to the market. Tax levels are calculated by combining an economic growth model with climate projections. Such models predict very little economic impact, at odds with the alarmist projections of climate science. Economic methodology and selective evidence combine to induce complacency. This was endorsed by a Nobel Prize for William Nordhaus, its leading exponent. Complacency was challenged within economics for not being predicted by extrapolation, disregarding future generations, and modelling the risks incorrectly. Economics bears some responsibility for the problem it tries to solve. It ignores non-rational forms of denial, and falls victim to them itself. With no guidance from economics on how to address climate change, the actual approach chosen is central government precommitment, in line with our own time-horizon model.

In this chapter I develop my argument to explain variation in the processes and mechanisms that lead to distinct strategies of resistance to criminal extortion. I first define the core concepts that readers will encounter throughout the book. Next I explain the logic of the argument to show how the intersection between the time horizons of criminal actors, the nature of local political economies, and whether there is criminal capture of the police shapes the strategies of resistance that victims pursue. I then outline the parameters under which I expect the argument to hold, and discuss how my study builds on insights into existing research. I conclude by discussing the research design, case selection, and the methodologies that I used to collect and analyze data.

Chapter 4 explains the little-understood mechanisms of profit-sharing within China’s vast bureaucracy, which are frequently dismissed as “organizational corruption.” Drawing on extensive interviews and an original dataset, I show that in the Chinese bureaucracy, fringe compensation is pegged to financial performance, making it an unusual variant of profit-sharing in the public sector. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the golden goose maxim – restraint today yields long-term benefits – is not just a parable but a reality, thus distinguishing China’s bureaucracy from myopic, predatory states elsewhere. For the global development community, this chapter sheds light on how poor-and-weak countries can escape the vicious cycle of poverty and corruption through what I term “transitional administrative institutions.”

In light of the recognition of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch of our own making – this chapter asks how well anthropology is equipped to deal with the challenge that the recognition of human geological agency presents to our time perspectives. It offers two theoretical starting points to initiate the conversation between anthropological theory and the history of the encounter with deep time within Britain: the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard and the geologist James Hutton. This discussion introduces three key questions for an anthropology of deep time: what is the relationship between human rhythms and the rhythms of the more-than-human world within which humans live? What is the significance of our time horizons, their proximity or distance? And whose time is deep time?

This chapter explores the particular significance of the present, and the ways in which anthropology has approached ‘presentism’ as a metaphysical claim, a sociological description, and a means of analysis. While recognising that an analysis of the conditions of presentism is crucial for understanding contemporary social life, the central argument here is that any attempt to embrace presentism as a methodological tool or even metaphysical truth risks distorting human activity in a disastrous way by abstracting it from the material environment that makes such activity possible. The chapter concludes with a reflection upon the relationship between time and mystification in order to understand temporal disjuncture: conditions of life which obscure – and at the same time are violently dissonant with – the temporality of the ecologies and geologies which make that life possible. The task for anthropology is to analyse the conditions of this extraction from deep time, not to replicate it.

This concluding chapter locates our present geological moment politically and economically, arguing that the major ecological degradation which has been made visible at the level of geological time is a result of the Lockean designation of ‘unused’ land as waste to be made productive. And crucially, this designation of land as waste goes hand in hand with the extraction from deep time: it involves bracketing out the long-term history of the landscape and its ecological future for the work of extracting economic value in the now. To expand our time horizons is, in fact, to recognise the contemporary relationship with deep time as wastage.

Chapter four empirically assess the veracity of the argument on why leaders nationalize their oil sectors and establish operational national oil companies (NOCs). To test hypotheses derived from the theory’s implications, this chapter presents the findings from a method of statistical analysis that combines the cross-national NOC dataset with information elicited from structured interviews with oil experts. This technique -- Bayesian statistics -- allows for a holistic analysis of the determinants of nationalization that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative evidence on NOC formation. The results show the importance of information diffusion and perceptions of leader survival in the decision to nationalize the oil sector. The chapter then offers a case comparison of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the 1940s to show how information diffusion to a strong regime led to maintaining private ownership in Saudi Arabia in 1949, while knowledge about revenue sharing diffused to a weak regime led to nationalization in Iran in 1951.

How and why is nationalization central to the politics of resource-rich countries? This chapter opens with a review of current theories on natural resource wealth and nationalization in political science, economics, and public policy, and then describes why existing theories are unable to answer the questions this book seeks to answer. With these questions in mind, this chapter presents the book’s central theory of why leaders nationalize and how leader survival shapes and is shaped by the choice of nationalization. After describing empirical implications of the argument, the chapter offers initial evidence to support these claims in the form of exploratory case studies of Iran and Iraq. In Iran, the shocking collapse of the Shah in 1979 defied the West’s notion of the “island of stability” in the tumultuous Middle East. In Iraq, the fall of the Hashemite monarchy in 1958 ushered in a decade of instability until the unexpected Ba’athist consolidation in 1968, when Hassan al-Bakr established a 35-year single-party dictatorship. These are precisely the types of outcomes in which the book’s theory predicts nationalization should affect the rise and fall of dictatorships.