Murphy’s The Economization of Life offers a powerful genealogy of how twentieth-century technoscience came to value human life through the macroeconomic figure of “the economy”. Rather than treating population control as a merely demographic or administrative project, Murphy argues that it formed part of a historically specific regime of valuation in which lives were differentially assessed according to their presumed capacity to foster or burden national economic futures. The introductory case of Raymond Pearl’s Drosophila bottles is decisive: fruit flies enclosed in a finite container were transformed into a visual and mathematical model of population growth, later generalised to human populations through the S-curve. Yet the apparent neutrality of this model concealed colonial and racialised assumptions, particularly when Pearl used French colonial data from Algeria to imagine colonised people as a population whose births and deaths could be graphed, forecast and managed. Murphy calls this process the economization of life: the conversion of aggregate life into a calculable object of governance, where reproduction, fertility, death and non-birth become matters of economic optimisation. The book distinguishes this from commodification or biocapital, because the value at stake is not primarily extracted through labour or biological material, but through the management of future life chances at the scale of population. Its case study of U.S.–Bangladeshi family-planning infrastructures shows how Cold War development, postcolonial governance, quantitative social science, global health and neoliberal experimentation converged to produce dense systems of counting, intervention and affect. These epistemic infrastructures did not simply describe population; they built the bureaucracies, data systems, funding circuits and reproductive policies through which certain lives became investable, expendable, preventable or “not worth being born”. Murphy’s central contribution is therefore to show that economy and population are not neutral containers for life, but historically made abstractions that organise racialised, gendered and colonial forms of valuation. To “smash the bottle” is to refuse the assumption that life must be governed through aggregate economic futures, and to reopen reproduction as a distributed, relational and politically contested practice.
URBANISM MEETS ART