Daniel Souleles

I am a sociocultural, ethnographic anthropologist, and hold a PhD in applied anthropology from Columbia University in New York City. I study politics, economics, and value in the United States, and have done extensive field work on Catholic hermit monks, private equity and venture capital investors, employee-owned companies (ESOPs, specifically), automated and algorithmic trading on financial markets, and the Massachusetts State Legislature. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how wealth, work, and worry are generated, controlled, distributed, horded, allocated, and/or destroyed, all in the context of financial capitalism. In the future, I’m looking forward to spending more time studying democracies, how political systems change, and imagining ways to build a better world. 

My most recent work has been on cultures of democracy in U.S. legislatures. In trying to understand how and why laws and policies get passed, I’ve determined that legislatures in the U.S. suffer from culture of avoidance, wherein actual legislative deliberation and decision making simply does not happen in public. Rather party dominance is such that much policy and legislative work happen behind the scenes and ahead of time, and that which happens in public is simply a ritual consecration of what’s already been decided. This is bad for democracy and democratic accountability as it makes it nearly impossible to understand what any given legislator supports or why any particular law passes the way it does. Part of my work involves documenting and describing structural fixes that would make democracy healthier. 

I’ve spent the bulk of my career studying financiers and financial markets. Starting with private equity and venture capital investors, then progressing to employee-owned companies and valuation bankers, and then spending a number of years studying the automation of public financial exchanges, I’ve tried to understand the relationship between cultures of finance, financial decision making, and the allocation of wealth in society. More than anything else, financiers see their expertise as a universal expertise, and expect everything to behave like a generic, profit-generating corporation. Obviously, the world doesn’t match up with these generic expectations, so a lot of the activity and inanity of contemporary finance exists in the friction between the real world and these strange expectations. Over many articles and a few books, I’ve spent a lot of time documenting and demystifying the world of finance. 

I am active in professional societies and am the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Economic Anthropology and serve on the editorial board of the journal Critique of Anthropology. I am also co-host of the anthropology advice podcast, People Stuff.