F inancial markets may be mercurial in their own right, but Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely seem to view finance a bit like mercury itself: it can be useful, but it’s dangerous and makes for bad medicine. Though finance has been around for thousands of years, the book charts the recent rise and proliferation of finance and financial markets—primarily in the United States over the last forty years—and considers its connection to inequality in society. The book makes the case for thinking that this process of financialization of our economy is in some significant ways responsible for growing and deleterious inequality, directly opposing an ideology that takes access to finance to provide the solution to such inequality. Lin and Neely define financialization as “the wide-ranging reversal of the role of finance from a secondary, supportive activity to a principal driver of the economy” (10, emphasis original). They argue that such a reversal has occurred in the United States, and they set about to show this through the growth of the financial sector itself, the influence of finance within the corporate world, and the burden of debt and financial planning placed onto individual households. They maintain that financialization thus understood is bad in itself insofar as it mistakes the source of economic value, but it is also instrumentally bad insofar as these mechanisms needlessly exacerbate inequality. They argue that these processes unfold in a number of ways. Financial institutions extract economic rents far in excess of their value. Such institutions engage in predatory practices, complexifying their products while leveraging political power to lobby for less regulation. Meanwhile, corporations have been distracted from delivering value to customers and security to employees; instead, they are pressured to please shareholders and grow financial wings themselves. Meanwhile, households have become increasingly rackedwith debt, andwe are told that a failure to get out of debt signifies poor saving habits and a lack of financial literacy. For Lin and Neely, the 2008 financial crisis was a largely missed opportunity to confront and reform these practices. Instead, governments sought to restore the status quo, confronting “too big to fail” with acceptance and regulation to avoid failure. Lin and Neely maintain that, in so doing, we have collectively failed to challenge this central, overbearing, and self-serving role that finance plays in the economy. Taken together,Divested is a powerful catharsis of the current economic moment. It uses resources from history, economics, sociology, and beyond to craft a narrative for how finance came to have such a central place in our economy (and in our lives). And it is not shy in communicating that this is an unhealthy and ultimately 203 Book Reviews

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剥离：金融时代的不平等，Ken-Hou Lin 和 Megan Tobias Neely。纽约：牛津大学出版社，2020 年。232 页。

金融市场本身可能是善变的，但 Ken-Hou Lin 和 Megan Tobias Neely 似乎认为金融有点像水银本身：它可能有用，但它很危险，而且是坏药。尽管金融已经存在了数千年，但这本书描绘了最近金融和金融市场的兴起和扩散——主要是在过去四十年的美国——并考虑了它与社会不平等的联系。这本书提出了这样一种观点，即我们经济的这种金融化过程在某些重要方面是造成日益严重和有害的不平等的原因，直接反对一种利用金融来解决这种不平等的意识形态。Lin 和 Neely 将金融化定义为“金融角色从次要、对经济主要驱动力的支持性活动”（10，强调原文）。他们认为美国已经发生了这样的逆转，他们着手通过金融部门本身的增长、金融在企业界的影响以及个人家庭的债务和财务规划负担来证明这一点. 他们坚持认为，这样理解的金融化本身就是不好的，因为它错误地理解了经济价值的来源，但如果这些机制不必要地加剧了不平等，那么它在工具上也是不好的。他们认为这些过程以多种方式展开。金融机构提取的经济租金远远超过其价值。这些机构从事掠夺性做法，使他们的产品复杂化，同时利用政治力量游说减少监管。与此同时，企业已经分心于为客户提供价值和为员工提供安全；相反，他们被迫取悦股东并自己发展金融翅膀。与此同时，家庭越来越负债累累，我们被告知，未能摆脱债务意味着不良的储蓄习惯和缺乏金融知识。对于 Lin 和 Neely 来说，2008 年的金融危机在很大程度上错失了对抗和改革这些做法的机会。相反，政府试图恢复现状，面对“太大而不能倒”的接受和监管以避免失败。林和尼利认为，这样做，我们集体未能挑战这个中心，霸道，以及金融在经济中扮演的自利角色。总而言之，剥离是对当前经济形势的有力宣泄。它利用来自历史、经济学、社会学等领域的资源来阐述金融如何在我们的经济（和我们的生活）中占据如此重要的地位。并且毫不害羞地交流说这是一本不健康的书，最终是 203 书评