The forecasting of failure gained greater momentum from around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, once credit reports were increasingly standardised and financial reports more widely available. The subsequent development of ratio analysis and risk indexes consolidated this calculative infrastructure, such that by the 1940s much of our contemporary apparatus for forecasting failure was in place. Since then, the forecasting of failure has become a massive industry for both academics and practitioners alike, albeit without reliable means yet for extrapolating from populations to individual entities.
Our coverage of each step in the formation of this calculative infrastructure has, of necessity, been brief. But we felt it important to focus on the entire chain of calculations that is at issue here, rather than focusing only on one particular metric or instrument. For it is only by linking primary financial records to more or less standardised published financial reports that a series of second and third order calculations can be established. And, once relatively standardised financial reports exist, ratios can be calculated of them, which can themselves be multiplied. In turn, (risk) indexes can be computed out of such ratios and financial reports, so that narrating and rating can be firmly disassociated. This made it possible for commentators and analysts to focus wholly or primarily on the single figure, which is so often the end point of such chains of calculation (Miller, 1994b). Our ‘modern’ calculative infrastructure for the economising of failure dates from the moment that this chain of calculations was established and stabilised.
A final point is worth emphasising. This is the reciprocity between entity formation and the calculative infrastructure which surrounds modern economic forms, whether in the private sector or increasingly the not-for-profit sector (Kurunmäki, 1999). In place of ‘reactivity’33, we have examined here a process of co-creation, through which a financial and legal entity has been formed in tandem with the calculative infrastructure through which it is assessed and regulated. In so far as the different components of this entire edifice fit each other, it is because they have been made to fit. Put differently, the making of markets requires the formation of the entities that populate them, together with allowance for their exit from the market game. It has taken roughly a century and a half to fashion such reciprocity, and we are still a long way from coming to terms with the implications of what has been created.