Life Expectancies: Mortality, Exhaustion, and Economic Stagnation

This essay takes up the history of theories of economic stagnation from Adam Smith to Alvin Hansen Larry Summers, attending especially to the way the exhausted body figures in those theories both as a metaphor for the economy's lack of development and as an empirical explanation for that non-development. I attend to the political implications of these demographic theories of slow- or no-growth, reframing revanchist claims about immobile classes, stagnant regions, and "burned-out" generations as powerful signals that something is rotten in late-stage capitalism.