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In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008—while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking—was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language—and particular failures in it—paved the way for ruin.

 Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a senior fellow of the Institute for Public Knowledge. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of editor of numerous books, including The Social Life of Things, Modernity at Large, Fear of Small Numbers, and The Future as Cultural Fact.