I have spent the majority of the last year living in London and working in climate finance while simultaneously reflecting on my lived experience through the lens of anthropology.
Now I plan to write about the last year (really the last three since I have been doing research in the green bond market) through the rest of the current year and halfway into 2019 (isn’t it great that academia gives you such long stretches of time to think about!).
Time, I was talking with a fellow anthropologist/finance hacker two days ago here in London about how to perceive/categorize elite forms of work and a lot of our conversation focused on the timescales involved to distinguish different classes. If you are a bartender your work is immediate, you pour drinks and give them to clients who give you cash, or tap their credit cards on wireless machines (at least in Europe, the US doesn’t have the EU to push forward payments technology legislation).
Elite labor, as accountants, investment bankers, architects, have jobs where their impact is not direct, they are on the side of great financial flows, developments, systems, of which they analyze and interact with on wider timescales than providing beer direct to a bar’s clientele.
Of course there is a lot of gray area here, beer makers are engaged in longer term production processes, stock traders are focused on immediate returns much of the time. Mark Carney of the Bank of England focuses on tragedies of horizon within finance as a system.
“It is all about adaptability as well” I write this blog post in the creative coffee space of Husk in Limehouse, London. These are the types of statements that move in the air around me as sound waves.
These are some thoughts that I am willing to put online attached to my name and livelihood. To share with the togetherness collective of the broader public and internet connections that attach to the institutions and organizations, robots that populate the cloud.
Cheers | Ciao
Aneil Tripathy, PhD 