The Price of Tomorrow: How Capitalism and Christian Theology Commodify the Future
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Figure: see text] This article examines how contemporary capitalism and Christian thought commodify the future through the lens of debt. Drawing on decolonial perspectives, it situates this commodification within the broader colonial matrix of power, arguing that both capitalist and Christian theological approaches to the future perpetuate systems of exploitation and control. This examination uncovers surprising parallels between economic and theological realms, challenging traditional separations between these domains. This work is organized in three parts. The first section explores three key economic mechanisms—futures markets, debt instruments, and retirement plans and pensions—to demonstrate how contemporary capitalism transforms the future into a tradable commodity. The second section analyzes how Christian economic theology, particularly through the doctrine of salvation, might have constructed the future as an asset/commodity using notions of debt. The third and final section proposes the Andean concept of Pachakuti as a potential framework for reimagining the future beyond the logic of commodification and debt. This interdisciplinary study calls for a critical examination of the profound connection between capitalism's exploitation of the future and the way economic Christian thinking has influenced our understanding of it. This study contributes to ongoing discussions in economic theology, decolonial theory, and critical examinations of capitalism's impact on temporal conceptualizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".