Introduction

1Why, in an era saturated with predictive models, climate scenarios, and economic forecasts, does collective action toward the future so often falter? Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future answers this question not by invoking moral failure or cognitive bias but by following a deceptively technical financial device: the practice of discounting. What looks like a neutral procedure for translating future revenues into present values becomes, in her hands, a political technology that governs how agents imagine, compare, and act on time. The book’s guiding claim is both simple and radical: modern economic rationality is built on a numerical technology that makes certain futures count and others “dis-count” (not count).

2A researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (Mines Paris, PSL), Doganova has long written at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of valuation. This monograph extends the “genealogy of calculation” pioneered by Miller and Napier (1993) and Callon’s theory of market devices into the terrain of temporality. It asks how discounting came to define the horizon of economic reasoning and, with it, the conditions of political responsibility. Spanning three centuries and multiple empirical domains, the book unfolds not as a history of ideas concerning discounting but rather a historical sociological study of it.

Summary of the book by chapters

3The opening chapter lays the conceptual foundation. Doganova defines discounting not as a neutral financial operation but as a political technology of temporality that simultaneously attributes value and orients human action. Drawing on Irving Fisher’s early 20th century economics, she shows how the principle of capitalization, valuing any asset as the present worth of its future income, converted a mathematical formula into a general form of reasoning. By detaching value from labor or use and anchoring it in projected returns, Fisher’s model transformed the future into the dominant temporal reference of modern economic rationality.

4The first empirical genealogy traces discounting’s emergence within 19th century forestry. Through the Faustmann formula, foresters began to compute the “net present value” of a forest based on discounted timber revenues. This practice turned trees into time-bearing assets and made rotation length a metric of efficiency. Doganova links this calculative innovation to broader conflicts over property and survival: states and landowners, able to wait decades, claimed stewardship of the future, while peasantry dependent on immediate access to wood were criminalized as irrational and unlawful. Sustainability, she argues, was born as an economic rather than ecological ideal, which represents a form of future colonizing the present.

5Moving to post-war American corporations, Doganova shows how discounting re-entered economic life through “capital budgeting”. Business schools and consulting firms promoted the net-present-value method as the cornerstone of rational management. By the 1980s, when the discount rate was redefined as the cost of capital, the method had become a disciplinary device aligning managerial decision-making with investor expectations. The corporate future was compressed into quarterly horizons, and prudence came to mean obedience to the tempo of finance. Discounting thus migrated from a technical calculation to a mode of governance within the firm.

6In contemporary biopharmaceutical research, discounting governs how uncertain futures are priced. Firms and venture-capital investors estimate the net-present-value of molecules that may never reach the market, converting scientific uncertainty into quantifiable risk. Through discounting, indeterminate futures are rendered commensurable and tradeable; the capacity to delay profit becomes a source of power. Doganova interprets this as a process of producing certainty through pricing: the future is not discovered but manufactured by the financial models that claim to measure it.

7The final case situates discounting in the sphere of sovereignty. During the 1970s-80s Chilean copper nationalization and its aftermath, the key dispute concerned how to compensate foreign firms. Allende’s government valued mines by past investment; Pinochet’s legal reform tied compensation to the discounted value of expected future profits. In embedding investors’ time horizons into law, Chile institutionalized the principle that the future itself could be owned. Discounting here became a juridical foundation of neoliberal order – guaranteeing returns not yet earned but already recognized as property.

8Finally, Doganova closes by restating her central claim: discounting is both a calculative method and a political technology that governs how states and societies relate to time. Across these cases, she vividly reveals a progressive abstraction in which value, action, and legitimacy are all indexed to the management of future streams. To “discount” is therefore to exercise power over temporality – to decide which futures matter, who may inhabit them, and how long the present can last. Her conclusion calls for denaturalizing this logic and imagining economic and political orders where the future is no longer priced into submission.

Relevance

9The implications of Discounting the Future extend well beyond the subfield of economic sociology. It offers a template for a sociology of the future – a mode of inquiry that does not begin from collective expectations or cultural imaginaries, but from the devices that make those visions operable and materializable. By following the mundane infrastructure of calculation, she shows that the governance of the future is less a matter of vision than of valuation. Futures are not merely imagined; they are priced, weighted, and – above all – discounted.

10In this sense, the book speaks directly to the dilemmas of our present. The world that Doganova describes is recognizably ours: a world governed by the arithmetic of climate accounting, the algorithms of risk management, and the spreadsheets of corporate sustainability. Each of these practices deploys the discount rate as a hidden hinge between ethics and economics. When climate economists adjust the “social cost of carbon,” or when pension funds choose a discount rate for long-term liabilities, they are not making technical choices but deciding whose future is worth protecting and whose can be sacrificed. Doganova’s genealogy thus serves as a warning: the discount rate is not a neutral coefficient but a political distribution of time, a subtle yet pervasive instrument for organizing responsibility and legitimacy across generations.

11On the one hand, for scholars of quantification, this book refines the familiar idea of governing by numbers by adding a crucial temporal dimension. To quantify the future is not simply to value it; it is to govern it, to domesticate its uncertainty and render it actionable. In this sense, discounting represents the culmination of the long project of commensuration analyzed by Espeland and Stevens: the conversion of heterogenous futures into comparable present values. What Doganova adds is a theory of how this act of commensuration reconfigures time itself, producing new asymmetries of agency between those who can set the rate and those who must live by it.

12For historians of capitalism on the other, her account offers a striking revision of periodization. Financialization of capital appears not as a late 20th century deviation from productive capitalism but as the historical fulfillment of a centuries-long temporal rationalization that began with forestry and spread through management science. Capitalism, in this view, is not only a system of accumulation but also a system for allocating time – for deciding which durations matter and which can be erased. Doganova’s genealogy thus invites us to read Marx’s critique of capital and Weber’s analysis of rationalization through a new lens: both are, in the end, accounts of how the future became calculable.

13Finally, the book’s relevance lies in its invitation to rethink sociology’s own relation to time. Doganova reminds us that sociological critique often inherits the very temporal assumptions it seeks to question – linear progress, deferred reform, patient accumulation of knowledge. To take her argument seriously would mean reflecting on the disciplinary discounting of the future within our own modes of scholarship. In that sense, Discounting the Future is not only a history of a political technology but also an implicit call for methodological renewal: a challenge to study how the calculative infrastructures of capitalism produce the horizons within which social science itself operates.

Critical reflections

14What makes this monograph so intellectually compelling is also what renders it open to debate. Doganova’s genealogy is extraordinarily coherent: she traces a line of descent from the forest to finance, showing how a single calculative operation gradually structured modern forms of reason. Yet this very coherence sometimes risks turning discounting into an all-encompassing explanatory principle. The reader wonders whether every calculative practice of the modern age can truly be reduced to the logic of the discounting, or whether the book’s brilliance lies precisely in exaggerating that unity to make visible the hidden architecture of capitalist temporality.

15The most striking achievement of Doganova’s narrative is her capacity to reveal how time itself becomes a terrain of inequality. By transforming waiting into a financial privilege, discounting differentiates not only between projects but also between people: those who can afford to postpone gratification and those compelled to live in immediacy. The chapters on forestry and corporate management show this vividly. The state and the shareholder both claim the authority of patience, while peasants and workers appear as temporal dependents, excluded from the future they help produce. Yet Doganova’s treatment of this asymmetry remains largely structural. The reader might wish for a closer view of the social struggles that unfold within and against this temporal regime: the ways in which actors contest the very metrics that define their horizons of action. We catch glimpses of resistance – Marx’s peasants, hesitant managers, or Chilean nationalists – but they remain fleeting figures within a history of the device. The genealogy thus reads more as a story of colonization than of conflict. What is missing, perhaps intentionally, is the everyday politics of calculation: how experts, bureaucrats, or citizens negotiate, manipulate, or subvert the rate that governs them.

16At the same time, Doganova’s analytical ambition to generalize discounting into a political form produces an interesting paradox. The book shows that discounting universalizes investment as the model of action, but in doing so it occasionally threatens to erase other temporalities that coexist with or resist this regime. The world she describes is extraordinarily totalizing: every domain, from forestry to pharmaceuticals, appears governed by the same calculus. Yet even within capitalism, there persist economies of care, religion, and art where value is neither deferred nor discounted, where waiting is not a cost but a virtue. To acknowledge these alternative grammars of time would not weaken Doganova’s argument but rather sharpen it, by clarifying where the logic of discounting fails to penetrate, where other futures might still be imaginable.

17A final tension concerns the book’s relation to scale and geography. The cases unfold largely within Euro-American contexts, culminating in Chile as a hinge between North and South. This narrative brilliantly demonstrates the globalization of capitalist temporality, yet it leaves open how discounting operates within different political economies of time – say, China’s state planning, postcolonial debt regimes, or Indigenous environmental stewardship. Doganova’s concept of the “political technology of temporality” could travel well into these settings, where the capacity to discount is both an economic instrument and a geopolitical privilege. Her framework thus invites comparative work on temporal sovereignty: who controls the future in a world of unequal presents.

18These reflections do not mean to diminish the book’s achievement. They confirm its generative power. By exposing the temporal logic underpinning modern governance, Doganova provides a vocabulary through which to question our own dependence on the calculus of anticipation. Her genealogy ends, but the inquiry it opens into the social life of the rate, the politics of waiting, and the multiplicity of futures remains ongoing. To read Discounting the Future is to realize that the discount rate is not a relic of 19th century economics but a living hinge between knowledge, power, and time. The challenge for future research is not simply to historicize it further, but to imagine how we might live, act, and plan in a world where the future need not always be discounted.