Financial markets and information technologies are key issues for contemporary social theory and the anthropology of globalization. Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago and London, I examine the interplay between processes of technological rationalization and the situated actions of traders in two financial futures markets—one that operates on open‐outcry pit technology and the other process online. Both technologies represent the market in numbers. Traders use these symbols to read and interpret the market. Yet each technology configures numbers differently. The technologies influence traders' practices by shaping this basic unit of financial knowledge, [finance, globalization, knowledge, numbers, technology, United States, England]

Contemporary social theorists usually conceive of risk negatively. Focusing on disasters and hazards, they see risk as an object of calculation and avoidance. But we gain a deeper understanding of risk in modern life if we observe it in another setting. Futures markets are exemplary sites of aggressive risk taking. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork on trading floors, this article shows how a high modern institution creates populations of risk‐taking specialists, and explores the ways that engagements with risk actively organize contemporary markets and forge economic actors. Financial exchanges are crucibles of capitalist production. At the Chicago Board of Trade, financial speculators structure their conduct and shape themselves around risk; and games organized around risk influence the social and spatial dynamics of market life.

Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve—a key economic indicator—point to this intractable problem of modern knowledge more generally. The devices that should create grounds for calculating future profits also open avenues of affect. Specifically, the reflexive character of financial devices provides fertile ground. As a forecasting tool, the yield curve's effectiveness is bound to its particular social content. Financial tools aggregate and objectify professionals' assessments about the economic future. Readers of the curve's shape must evaluate the rationality of the economic participants whose activities compose this reflexive device. Reading the financial future places affect at the center of calculation.

The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value the present at the expense of the future? There is contentious debate within the field over how to model this tendency at the neural level. Should the brain be conceptualized as a unified decision-making apparatus, or as the site of conflict between an impetuous limbic system at perpetual odds with its deliberate and provident overseer in the prefrontal cortex? Scientific debates over choice-making in the brain, we argue, are also debates over how to define the constraints on human reason with which regulative strategies must contend. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how the brain and its treatment of the future become the contested terrain for distinct visions of governmental intervention into problems of human choice-making.

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