Surrogacy - contracted gestation and birthing of babies for other people - is a multibillion-dollar global industry. Because it commodifies a practice that belongs to an intimate, "sacred" sphere of the family, and mixes babies and money, it offers a natural window into a theoretical problem of...

This issue centers on the encounter between the economy and the human body. Economics, like other social sciences, treats people mostly as disembodied actors who never catch viruses or suffer from back pain or creeping dementia. These abstract actors are all too often assumed also to be...