Fix, Blair2022-10-282022-10-282021The Ritual of Capitalization. Fix, Blair. (2021). Real-World Economics Review. No. 97. September. pp. 78-95. (Article - Journal; English).http://hdl.handle.net/10315/39804capitalization discounting power stock marketFor more than a century, political economists have sought to understand the nature of capital. The prevailing wisdom is that there must be something ‘real’ – some productive capacity – that underpins capitalized values. This thinking, I argue, is a mistake. Building on Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of capital as power, I argue that capitalization is an ideology. It is a quantitative ritual for converting earnings into present value. Although the ritual is arbitrary, it gives rise to astonishing empirical regularities, reviewed here.Article