How Discounted Cash Flow Became the Natural Way of Responding to our Collective Problems: An Interview with Liliana Doganova

On January 7, I chatted with Liliana Doganova, Associate Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines Paris, about her 2024 book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology. The book is a brilliant study of “discounted cash flow”, a technique, or a series of techniques, that are both crucial in contemporary businesses and are also at the center of current debates on how to respond to crucial matters of collective concerns, including the climate crisis. I begin with a summary of the book’s argument (more useful to those who have not read it yet, if you have read it, you can perfectly skip about five minutes) to continue with questions organized in five themes: (1) [from min. 5] the book’s analytical concepts and, in particular, how Liliana uses Akrich’s concept of technical object and script, (2) [from min. 20] the debates in Discounting the Future with related literature, with an emphasis on Liliana’s polemic with recent work by Jens Beckert, (3) [from min. 42] the book’s claim that management was financialized before it is normally understood, (4) [from min. 52] her fascinating chapter on José Piñera and the mining reforms in Chile, and (5) [from min. 68] how Liliana understands where agency is situated in discounting cash flow techniques, and, by extension, the politics of the book.