Automating Finance

Sociologist Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a professor at University of California San Diego, talks about his book Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge UP, 2019) with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book traces the long, largely anonymous, and in some senses boring history of how experts applied computers to financial systems since the 1970s, creating a digital infrastructure of the trading world. The conversation also touches on Pardo-Guerra’s more recent work on how systems of quantitative metrics have been applied to the management of universities and what might be done about it.