Today’s financialized economy is ill-suited to develop technologies to replace fossil fuels. This is what Max Jerneck finds in his newly published study of the early American solar energy industry. It emerged in the same era as financialization, in the 1970s and 1980s, and was greatly harmed by it, he finds. The case is contrasted with Japan, where financialization was not allowed to affect corporate governance in the same way. The article is published inScience Advances, the online offshoot of Science. This means that it reaches a more general audience than just social scientists, in line with the interdisciplinary mission of Misum.

The article is open access, available here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1601861

Interview with Max Jerneck about the study here.