https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312680 Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:42:28 GMT 2026-10-22T21:42:28Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312756 Title: Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning Authors: Rilinger, Georg Abstract: A new framework for studying markets as the product of organizational planning and understanding the practical limits of market design. The Western energy crisis was one of the great financial disasters of the past century. The crisis began in April 2000, when price spikes started to rattle California's electricity markets. Decades later, some blame economic fundamentals and ignorant politicians, while others accuse the energy sellers who raided the markets. In Failure by Design, sociologist Georg Rilinger offers a different explanation, one that focuses on the practical challenges of market design. The unique physical attributes of electricity made it exceedingly difficult to introduce markets into the coordination of the electricity system, so market designers were brought in to construct the infrastructures that coordinate how market participants interact. An exercise in social engineering, these infrastructures were intended to guide market actors toward behavior that would produce optimal market results and facilitate grid management. Yet, though these experts spent their days worrying about incentive misalignment and market manipulation, they unintentionally created a system riddled with opportunities for destructive behavior. Rilinger's analysis not only illuminates the California energy crisis but also develops a broader theoretical framework for thinking about markets as the products of organizational planning and the limits of social engineering, contributing broadly to sociological and economic thinking about the nature of markets. Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312756 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/321953 Title: An Outline of the Origins of Money Authors: Schurtz, Heinrich Abstract: On this subject, I only knew the excellent little book by the late Schurtz"— Marcel Mauss, 1914, "Les origines de la notion de monnaie".Heinrich Schurtz's 1898 book has been a touchstone for economic historians, anthropologists, and philosophers interested in the nature and origins of money in various societies, including Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, and Karl Polanyi. Schurtz experimented with concepts about money, going beyond traditional economic paradigms. Drawing on an extensive range of archaeological and ethnographic sources, he reframed a theory of money to include its materiality, symbolic nature, relationship to forms of property, and its dual origin in "outside-" and "inside-money." While not well known today, it was important to the theorization of money in the first half of the 20th century and its innovative synthesis offers galvanizing questions and insights into how value relations are formed and how currency systems are interrelated. Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/10419/321953 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z