Can you see the economy? We know it is here—all around us—but even its most famous theorists evoke the economy as the invisible (Adam Smith), a spirit (Max Weber), a specter (Karl Marx). How can we make this spectral quality something we can understand, analyze, and act upon? Where does it start and end—what are the boundaries and limits of the economic? In exploring these questions this class operates at several levels simultaneously: we seek to explain the relation of the economic to the global, but also to explain how something called the Global Economy is brought into being, how it is made visible and invisible, by whom and for whom, and with what effects. In this class you will explore the circulation of money, goods, bodies, and ideas that make up the global economy as experienced and lived today. We explore how ideas about value (as in getting a good deal) and values (as in what really matters) relate to emerging practices in consumption, production, and work around the world. Readings will be drawn from classic texts, contemporary commentary, and case studies from a variety of disciplines that seek to understand how the “economic” relates to the unparalleled interconnectivity, inequality and interdependence of our contemporary reality. Ultimately it is an inquiry into the kind of global society being created today: Marx once wrote “the hand-mill gave us society with the feudal lord, and the steam-mill gave us society with the industrial capitalist.” What will the digital age give us?