The Complexity of Capital

Application summary

In this post-doctoral project, I will study measures of complexity in two domains of capitalist circulation and accumulation: rental housing and shipping. While my previous work has demonstrated how complexity is brought fourth through weaving opaque forms of ownership around the immobile physical asset of housing, shipping renders the production and circulation of goods opaque through the movement of assets between far-away locations. In the first instance, the primary driver of complexity is the legal "code of capital" that facilitates organizational forms that are almost impossible to untangle. In the second instance, complexity emerges through the physical movement of goods over time and space, a "spatial fix" between jurisdictions and geographies. In the domain of housing, I compare different rental housing ownership networks through mathematical measures of complexity. What aspects of a social theory and story about the experience of complexity do they capture? Does complexity not only correlate with, but also drive ownership concentration? What kinds of developments do we see in important phenomena such as rents and eviction rates as housing units enter or leave a complex network? What kind of standards would be necessary to give tenants access to all relevant data about their landlords? If the complexity of housing networks is a product of businesses using legal codes to create an organizational distance between them and their properties, then the complexity in shipping seems to stem from an almost inverse process. Today, large ships are expected to adhere to the automatic identification system (AIS) that provides a continuous signal on the location of the ship. Nonetheless, up to 40% of ships are known to use AIS erroneously or turn it off for various reasons. Using open satellite data, I will trace a small sample of ships outside of the AIS system in order to understand what kind of broader geopolitical and economic trends are traced through their paths.