Institute News

Herman Mark Schwartz is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and will be joining the MPIfG in May for three months as this year’s Scholar in Residence. He is the author and editor of numerous books on topics including economic development, globalization, and the geopolitics of the subprime mortgage crisis, the welfare state in Denmark, and employment policy. more

The Board of Trustees of the MPIfG convened in February 2023 for this year’s ordinary meeting, which was chaired by Michael Hüther. more

The MPIfG’s Public Lectures program has five events lined up for the 2023 summer semester. more

As wealth inequality increases, so too does sociological research interest in wealthy families as powerful social actors. In the latest issue of the MPIfG’s German-language magazine Gesellschaftsforschung, group leader of the Business, Ownership, and Family Wealth research group Isabell Stamm presents her research on wealthy dynastic families in contemporary capitalism. more

Lisa Suckert was re-elected in March of this year as a member of the board of the Economic Sociology Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and simultaneously as its spokesperson. The Section’s role is to bring together economic sociology research and education in Germany, advance scholarly exchange in the discipline, and raise awareness of economic sociology among the public. more

Arianna Tassinari more

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

Lisa Suckert, wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, plädiert für eine differenziertere Wahrnehmung der Brexit-Kampagne und der ökonomischen Identität Großbritanniens. Doch auch die EU sei gefragt: Sie müsse sich verändern, um die Bedürfnisse von Austrittsbefürwortern innerhalb der EU besser zu verstehen, gegenzusteuern und den europäischen Zusammenhalt zu stärken. more

Seit jeher versuchen Menschen, die Zukunft vorherzusehen: aus Träumen, aus den Sternen oder mithilfe von Karten und Würfeln. Heute scheinen die Bedingungen für verlässliche Vorhersagen dank großer Datenbanken und computergestützter Auswertung besser denn je. Akos Rona-Tas warnt jedoch vor zu viel Vertrauen in die neuen Prognosetechniken. Der Soziologieprofessor an der University of California San Diego, der im Sommersemester 2018 Scholar in Residence am Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Köln war, befasst sich mit den Schattenseiten moderner Wahrsagung. more

Highlights more

Institutstag 2022 more

Institutstag 2022 more

Institutstag 2022 more

Institutstag 2022 more

Isabella Weber’s presentation will start from How China Escaped Shock Therapy, her book charting China’s early reform debates, when economists and policy-makers were grappling with the question of how to maintain price stability in the transition to a market economy. In the second part of her talk, she will lay out how her China research has led her to an analysis of today’s inflation that considers the systemic significance of certain prices for overall economic stability. more

In “The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism” Leon Wansleben explores how global finance has gone from crisis to crisis over the past decades, despite the promise of stability from increasingly influential central banks. How can we explain this development? more

From Occupy Wall Street and the Panama Papers to the Russian oligarchs, their yachts and real estate – in recent years, the rich and super-rich as well as the finance industry and the services they offer to the rich have become the subject of much public and academic debate. more

Do your own research! Type “NESARA GESARA” and see what you learn. Or try “OPPT UCC” instead. You will access ideals of sovereignty, emancipation, life, money, and wealth; tutorials on the codes and procedures that are needed in order to subvert the dominant order and lead to financial salvation; and lessons on the spiritual menaces and economic enmities that justify this newly found path. Mixtures of millennialism, esotericism, conspiratorialism, populism, antisemitism, libertarianism, and nationalism can indeed be observed in a number of contemporary movements of economic redemption. These can sometimes find expression in troubling ways: in a cult, perhaps, or in violence,as in the case of “sovereign citizen” extremism. Other times, they translate into innocuous pastimes, mundane skepticism, or dodgy investment schemes. Documenting these practices furthers understanding of the financial element that is at work in the culture of contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse. But it also opens up a promising lead for the anthropology of finance, as it exposes the delirious potentials of ordinary concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. The case of “OPPT” (One People’s Public Trust) provides a testbed for a critical inquiry into the demons inherent in financial imagination. more

During the 2010s, the European project suffered a series of crises that underlined both a shift in geopolitics as well as the decline of the previous consensus around the single market and the single currency. The decade showed the different attitudes of national elites towards the reigning consensus and the limits of the EU’s macroeconomic regime that was no longer compatible with certain national growth models. more