Debt: Ethics, the Environment, and the Economy

By Peter Y. Paik and Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Essays exploring questions of what we owe—to corporations, to governments, to each other, to the past, and to the future.

From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various senses and from a wide range of perspectives.

They observe that many views of ethics, citizenship, and governance are based on a conception of debts owed by one individual to others; that artistic and literary creativity involves the artist’s dialogue with the works of the past; and that the specter of catastrophic climate change has underscored the debt those living in the present owe to future generations.

“A welcome range of new perspectives on what has become a central issue for contemporary debate.” —Anthropological Notebooks

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253009432

Book preview

Introduction

Peter Y. Paik

T HIS VOLUME HAS its origins in a conference on the subject of debt that took place at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in late April 2010. The planning for the event began during the fall of 2008, under the shadow of the cataclysmic events that imperiled the entire global financial system. The sudden collapse in housing prices in the United States, triggered by a wave of foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market, wiped out the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which has proven to be the largest bankruptcy in history. The contagion threatened to spread to other financial institutions and was met by massive infusions of taxpayer money to prevent further meltdowns. The insurance company AIG, which had insured the risky securities that were backed up by subprime loans, turned to the Federal Reserve for emergency loans that amounted to the largest corporate bailout in history. ¹ The US government nationalized the mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while arranging the takeover of troubled firms like Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Mortgage by Bank of America. The situation was no less dire across the Atlantic. Iceland, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, became the first developed nation since 1976 to turn to the IMF for help after all of its banks collapsed and the value of its currency plummeted, freezing its foreign currency reserves. ² In the United Kingdom, where the financial sector took up a greater share of the economy than in the United States, the cost of bailing out the failing banks was accordingly higher, but these rescue packages came with a stronger set of restrictions.

The tense and unnerving days of the crisis, when the contagion of defaults and bankruptcies brought the global economy to the edge of collapse, have given way in many places to a diffuse and inchoate sense of despair. Although official economic indicators state that the recession came to an end in mid-2009, rates of joblessness have remained stubbornly high, the already vast income disparities have continued to widen between the super-rich and the middle class, and declining tax revenues have forced governments to make painful cuts to social programs. The global financial system may have been saved by government intervention on a massive scale, but in the United States, efforts to help the poor and the middle class in the form of mortgage relief and job creation have proven paltry and inadequate. The global economy continues to lurch forward into this strange recovery, in which taxpayer funds have not only rescued the financial sector but enabled the banks to reap enormous profits, while increasing numbers of people in the United States fall out of the middle class into low-wage jobs that leave them exposed to the possibility of penury in the event of an accident or a health emergency.

These worsening inequalities and the disappearance for many of the chance to achieve or maintain a middle-class way of life have spawned protest movements across the globe. Mass demonstrations forced Iceland's promarket Independence Party from power, enabling a coalition of left-wing parties to take over. But in other countries, like Spain, Greece, and the United States, the protests were undertaken by groups expressing a fundamental discontent with the existing political system itself, a frustration over its apparent helplessness to provide a remedy for deepening economic disparities. The Occupy movement, which set up camps in the major cities across the United States, often near the city's financial center, arose in large part in response to the fateful decisions of the Obama administration neither to reform the financial industry nor to hold accountable any of the heads of the big banks whose exotic financial instruments brought about the catastrophic meltdown. Indeed, the bailouts of the major financial institutions were also a spark for the rage igniting the Tea Party, a right-wing populist movement with libertarian tendencies that champions drastic reductions in government spending.

The most heated and violent demonstrations in response to austerity measures aimed at reducing government deficits have taken place in Greece, where mass layoffs of state workers, deep cuts to salaries and pensions, and sizable tax hikes have threatened hundreds of thousands of Greeks with destitution. Although rioting in Greece has led to fatalities, the demonstrations there have had a clear political significance. The same cannot be said of the rioting and looting that swept the United Kingdom during the summer of 2011, in which looters attacked fellow residents and businesses in their own or nearby neighborhoods. The self-destructive and pointless violence of the rioters was divorced from any recognizable political demand, making their rage as excluded consumers more virulent than the responses of protesters issuing concrete demands, however difficult their realization.³ The status quo is not only coming under the pressure of political movements calling for fundamental reforms but is also threatened by demands that no political or economic system can fulfill without jettisoning liberalism or democracy.

Although it is clear that the Anglo-American version of capitalism centered on privatization and deregulation has failed, the question of an alternative remains dauntingly elusive. As John Lanchester points out, a genuine recovery will not take place until we face up to the debts racked up by a series of bubbles caused by real estate prices, cheap credit, and years of deficit spending under the profligate administration of George W. Bush.⁴ But this recovery can be made good only if there is a collective reckoning with the goals that have been taken to be self-evident in a capitalist economy: working hard for long hours toward an always-receding vision of contentment.⁵ Such a reckoning would ideally lead us to address the urgent issues that have been relegated to the margins in the midst of our economic emergency, such as the depletion of nonrenewable resources, which imposes insuperable limits on the spread of economic prosperity and is a primary cause for conflict among capitalist states. The cataclysmic jolts that nearly brought down the financial system ought to compel us to reflect not only on the debts recklessly accumulated by financial institutions in their relentless pursuit of ever higher profits but also on the other meanings of debt, which are bound up with our conceptions of justice, the good life, and our obligations to future generations. If questions such as how the economic system should change and what ought to replace it seem overwhelming, it is in part because they touch on concerns at the very basis of social and political order.

The elementary definition of debt is something one owes to another. Debt may take the form of capital that one has borrowed and must repay, a service that one is obliged to render or a duty that one must fulfill, or a transgression that must be expiated. In each of these instances, debt evokes limits and constraints on our range of action, as it calls to mind acts we might not perform and commitments we might not fulfill were we left wholly to our own devices. Loans must be repaid, obligations to society honored, and penitence for wrongful actions demonstrated. But if we typically regard economic debts as an undesirable state of dependency whose costs increase the longer they go unpaid, while the idea of collective atonement for historical injustices arouses controversy over how the past should affect the present, we often speak of debt in the sense of moral obligation as a vital social good. Debt in this sense is not something one should seek to terminate—it is not a burden to be escaped as soon as one has accumulated enough capital to pay it off. Rather, moral debt constitutes a commitment to be fulfilled over the course of one's lifetime, as the provision of one's membership in a community and as the obligation of citizenship. Debt as moral obligation strengthens the social fabric, makes individuals aware of needs and goods beyond their immediate interests, and sustains a network of reciprocity that stretches across generations and, ideally, transcends social, economic, and ethnic differences.

What renders debt in its nonfinancial meanings so elusive for us as an object of thought is the conception of freedom at the heart of modern liberalism. Although the fundamental ethical values of modern societies, such as respect for the dignity of others and concern to protect the environment, readily call to mind the condition of indebtedness, modern liberalism leaves the strength of any moral obligation for the individual to determine. Thus, while debt in the moral sense may possess a clear and straightforward meaning for most people, its symbolic force hangs very much in doubt. To speak of debt as a moral and social obligation, whether to the environment or even to one's own family, is necessarily to speak of it at a remove, since what in earlier periods was recognized as self-evidently authoritative has now become subject to individual preference. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that debts which are binding only to the extent that an individual is willing to acknowledge them as such can still be called debts at all. We come up against a paradox: we are free to fulfill those obligations we choose and accordingly free not to honor other commitments, but the very primacy of individual choice sabotages the capacity of individuals to join together to act on behalf of a common good. Debt, as moral obligation, ought to strengthen the social fabric, make individuals aware of needs and goods beyond their immediate interests, and sustain a network of reciprocity that stretches across generations and transcends social, economic, and ethnic differences. The fact that it does not, while nevertheless keeping us in a state of dependency and heteronomy, is perhaps the defining philosophical and political dilemma of liberal capitalist societies, for which the recognition of their long-term interests no longer amounts to a sufficient condition to pursue them.

The chapters in this collection take on the urgent and difficult task of thinking obligations and limits across a variety of disciplines. The chapters' themes meet and overlap in intriguing ways with other recent work on the subject of debt by writers who are not economists, such as Margaret Atwood's Payback and David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Atwood's book explores the concept in a series of digressive meditations that range from ancient notions of transgression and expiation to the dire environmental warnings of the Club of Rome, while Graeber's sprawling yet methodical study compares economic systems, marked by oscillations between virtual currencies and those backed by precious metals, across five millennia of human history. Yet what is common to both is an attempt to understand the problem of debt within a grand world-historical or cosmic scale. To analyze debt in this sense is to examine the very basis of human institutions. The essays collected in this volume work within a narrower and more specific frame of reference, yet also go to the heart of human beliefs and activities in imparting to us a stronger sense of what it means to inhabit a shared world.

The first group of contributors take on the subject of economic debt and its social consequences. Richard Wolff gives a lucid account of the present economic downturn that traces its sources to the patterns of increasing indebtedness among consumers, financial institutions, and the US government during the past three decades. Consumers have turned to credit cards and second mortgages in order to compensate for stagnant wages and to maintain their standard of living. Financial institutions rely on loans to leverage higher rates of profit on investments, while the budget of the government has gone into the red for the sake of providing services and maintaining a worldwide military presence without having to resort to the politically unpopular measure of raising taxes. Given the underlying fragility of such an economic system, in which meltdowns become increasingly destructive and recovery is rendered more difficult by huge debt burdens, Wolff calls for a restructuring of the economy to make economic decisions more accountable to producers and consumers alike. The inclusion of workers in boards of directors, for example, would constrain the pursuit of short-term profit that has resulted in the massive outsourcing of American jobs. The cooperative model of enterprise, which has already achieved great success in the technology sector, could be extended to other areas of the economy. Such a shift, though not a panacea for all economic ills, is likely to reduce the instability of the economy that has led to downturns of escalating magnitude since the 1980s.

If the meltdown of the mortgage market plays out as a familiar story of unrestrained greed and predatory practices, Elaine Lewinnek relates the often startling history behind the American dream of home ownership. The goal of home ownership in the modern United States was initially embraced most widely by an unexpected segment of the population—recent immigrants who were in most cases impoverished. Lewinnek cites the startling statistic that in 1939 the rate of home ownership among immigrants in Chicago, most of whom lived in slums, was 41.3 percent, compared to 21.7 percent for native-born whites. Immigrants bought houses because they felt a house could grant them some measure of security in straitened economic circumstances. But the realities of home ownership entailed bitter sacrifices for immigrants working in low-wage jobs. Mothers and children were compelled to enter the workforce to help make monthly mortgage payments, and it was common for families to forgo necessities such as indoor plumbing and even food. As Lewinnek points out, social workers were often shocked to find hungry and shivering children living in homes on which their parents had taken out mortgages. The image of the proletariat scraping by, leading precarious lives of underconsumption for the sake of maintaining home ownership, reveals striking resonances to the present-day crisis of the middle class, in which the collapse of housing prices and the rise of foreclosures have shattered for many the hope of maintaining their former way of life. It is instructive to note that while the middle class at the turn of the century did not consider home ownership to be vital for enjoying domestic stability, one of the heaviest burdens on the middle class is a house that one cannot sell, a problem that curtails the flexibility of the labor market.

In Demonizing Debt, Naturalizing Finance, Mary Poovey examines what she considers to be the three transvaluations of economic debt in the modern period. The first transvaluation turned debt from an understanding of the human condition—to be a fallen creature in the sight of God and to exist in a network of interdependent and interlocking relationships—into a personal failing. Credit and trust were once considered indissoluble from belief in God, but the emergence of the capitalist economy and the rise of the secular conception of the autonomous self, in widening the bounds of human agency, increasingly turned debt into a matter of individual choice, and the outcome of a bad one at that. The belief that debt constituted a grave moral lapse led to the establishment of debtors' prisons and other punitive practices. But this Victorian transvaluation gave way to economic realities that left nations and people in chronic debt. The sheer difficulty of staying out of debt set in motion the second major transvaluation, in which certain forms of indebtedness were deemed necessary and virtuous. Moreover, the cost of financing wars led governments, like the United States during the Civil War, to sell bonds that blurred the distinctions between debt and investment. In this second valuation, the principle of thrift took hold as the standard by which to distinguish between debts that were economically productive and led to full participation in the economy, such as buying houses, purchasing insurance, and making investments, and debts that were wasteful and destructive. It is the limitation posed by the idea of thrift that is swept away by the third transvaluation, in which consumer spending becomes identified with the health of the economy. The practice of installment purchasing was a vital factor in this shift, in which the credit rating of the borrower overshadowed altogether the nature of his or her purchases. As Poovey points out, the linkage of national prosperity with personal consumer consumption essentially guarantees that personal indebtedness will increase. The unsustainable character of this predicament is triggering a fourth transvaluation whose shape and impact are still taking shape.

Michael Gillespie likewise addresses a fundamental shift in the conception of debt that has taken place in the modern world. The idea of debt in the ancient and medieval worlds is expansive and comprehensive, encompassing all the relations of human beings to each other as well as to nature and the cosmos itself. The dictum of the pre-Socratic thinker Anaximander that all things that come into being must pay a debt to time by passing away informs ancient conceptions of justice, and a no less encompassing view of debt is sustained by Christianity in the doctrines of forgiveness and original sin. But the modern reduction of debt to its economic sense proceeds from the emancipation of human powers and capacities to pursue scientific discovery and technological advancement. The modern world turns the natural world into an inert storehouse of resources to be used for economic development, but the capitalist economy makes possible a society in which growth and wealth become at last possible without war. A society's use of science and technology to overcome scarcities imposed by nature is a historical breakthrough that depends on emancipation from the stifling customs, constraints, and limitations of premodern societies. As Gillespie emphasizes, however, such emancipation proves to be a mixed blessing. A society based on economic growth, which increases vastly the freedom of the individual, is one that tends to lose sight of the vital obligations of the present generation both to its ancestors and to its descendants. For economic debt creates patterns of consumption and expansion that are self-perpetuating and difficult to alter, even if the ongoing economic crisis highlights the need for fundamental change.

The belief in limitless growth is the central idea of the capitalist economic system. As Joel Magnuson shows in The Growth Imperative: Prosperity or Poverty, such a belief entails a debt that must be paid by future generations in the form of depleted natural resources and a degraded and polluted natural environment. The idea of perpetual growth represents the key myth of our time, and the need to maintain faith in this doctrine has discouraged both economists and the public from confronting the dire environmental repercussions of economic progress. Magnuson points out that such an economy tends to produce illusory growth in the form of asset bubbles because of the underlying imperative to generate profit. In such instances, wealth, in the absence of a real increase, ends up being redistributed upward. An economy centered on growth is also incapable of addressing the problem of greenhouse gas emissions—schemes involving energy credits cannot lead to substantial reductions, as corporations will find it more profitable to purchase credits that allow them to continue their environmentally destructive operations than to cut back on pollution. Magnuson also considers the overuse of resources that are otherwise renewable—water, topsoil, forests—and finds that so long as the economic system is shaped by the growth imperative there will be little chance of avoiding a calamitous loss of vital resources.

Democracy's Debt: Capitalism and Cultural Revolution, by Stephen L. Gardner, takes a challenging and provocative approach to the troubled relationship between democracy and capitalism. What if the major problem of the era of global capitalism is not that bourgeois capitalism is too conservative but that it is in fact too radical? What if democracy, and the principle of equality of conditions, are not antithetical to the immense economic inequalities created by neoliberal capitalism but at the heart of them? According to Gardner, what we understand as democracy has become indissoluble from capitalism, throwing us into the terrifying dilemma whereby the act of abolishing the nihilistic individualism of contemporary society, its unconstrained pursuit of greed and relentless fixation with self-display, would also entail the demise of democracy. For Gardner, the cultural revolution carried out by the bourgeoisie is both more radical and thoroughgoing than the one imagined by its socialist rivals—witness the rapidity with which formerly socialist nations have embraced capitalist markets. But the bourgeois revolution opens up destructive forces that it may not be able to contain over the long run. While equality is a moral good, it nevertheless serves to exacerbate conflicts between individuals because democracy removes the traditional mechanisms for containing and quelling social conflict, such as religion, tradition, and social hierarchy. The principal method employed by democracy to keep social antagonism within acceptable limits, Gardner points out, is the expansion of debt, in the form of credit that makes possible the financing of a lifestyle based on consumption. The pursuit of wealth, so long as a critical mass of people can maintain the belief that affluence is within their reach, prevents social antagonism from reaching explosive levels. The recent riots in London, in which most of the participants were young people who felt excluded from the consumerist utopia enjoyed by the rich, underscore the fragility of democracy in the absence of a growing economy. Gardner's bracing dictum that markets are democracy in motion underscores the reality that in a democracy what is left for equals to agree on as the criterion of value is money. Thus immense economic inequalities do not transgress or contravene what Gardner calls democratic desire. Rather, such inequalities are born of the practices and institutions devised to fulfill the democratic desire for prosperity. Gardner's arguments defy the conventional categorizations of politics between Left and Right, underscoring the need for more heterogeneous and flexible approaches to political questions that can meet the challenge of theorizing the middle-class populism of the Tea Party in the United States as well as riots in which the looters are moved not by political passion but by the desire for participation in a fading consumer culture.

Morris Berman's chapter, Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart, argues that the collapse of the real estate bubble represents the culmination of the greed and individualism that have become increasingly powerful forces in American society. Since the decade following its founding, American society has generally favored, at decisive forks in its development, individualist over community-based solutions. Thus the United States has become increasingly fragmented in recent decades, a fact driven home by its high rates of incarceration, use of antidepressants, and numbers of individuals living alone. The crisis into which American society has plunged might be intractable, since there is scant political will, even in the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, to remedy long-standing structural defects in the economy, especially the corrupt practices of the financial sector. Moreover, the faith in the American way of life, as Berman points out, can be maintained only so long as one represses the truth of living in a world where action engenders reaction. The possibility of recovery is thus undermined not only by political paralysis but by the inability of a society in decline to face the reality of its position in the world.

There is some debate among conservationists and others concerned about the destruction inflicted by industrial society on the environment as to the point when the human species went wrong in its relationship to the natural world. Some argue that the devastation of the natural world, the destruction of entire habitats, and the mass extinction of animal species were made inevitable with the coming of the modern age, when the advancement of technology and the spread of commercial activity enabled increasing numbers of human beings to make and possess a wide range of products as well as to accumulate vast wealth. Others locate the moment of the environmental fall at a far earlier moment, with the emergence of religions teaching the belief that human beings occupy a privileged and exceptional place in the cosmos and are to be elevated above animal life. Perhaps the turn to agriculture is where we should draw the more or less unbroken line that leads to a civilization endangered by rising sea levels and erratic weather patterns, or maybe the turning point was the discovery of tools. Although such debates seem fruitless and are in all likelihood impossible to resolve, they have the effect of making us conscious of the brevity of the duration in which human beings have inhabited the earth, and also of the vast yet inconspicuous patterns of natural life that typically escape the anthropocentric perspective.

As Julianne Lutz Warren points out in her chapter Measures of Time: Exploring Debt, Imagination, and Real Nature, over the long run of evolutionary history, the number of species that have emerged through natural selection is greater than the number of those that have gone extinct. Nature is endowed with a capacity for self-renewal, and the more biodiversity there is in an ecosystem, the more resilient it tends to be. Industrial civilization impairs this self-renewing capacity, and the breakneck pace of economic growth sets in motion a wave of extinctions and the loss of biodiversity. As Warren emphasizes, the harm that unchecked growth inflicts on nature threatens economic development as well. For example, more than a third of the globe's arable land has been lost since the emergence of agriculture, but the bulk of this loss has taken place during the past forty years. The capacity of the planet to support life has been greatly reduced by an economy based on expansion. The absence of effective political measures to reverse the course of mass extinctions and the destruction of biodiversity have resulted in a situation in which it is left to literature to grapple with the harsh and calamitous future that unconstrained growth has set in motion. Bargains with the forces of darkness, the manifestation of justice as a punishing Fury, and the destruction of the natural world itself are the literary themes that Warren regards as the most meaningful and significant for our time.

Worsening levels of pollution, overfishing, and the destruction of entire ecosystems for the sake of gaining access to raw materials are setting in motion a mass extinction of animal life. Biologist and author E. O. Wilson notes that by 2022 as much as 20 percent of the world's animal species could be wiped out, with extinction levels rising to 50 percent shortly thereafter. The Time of Living Dead Species: Extinction Debt and Futurity in Madagascar, by Genese Marie Sodikoff, explores conservation efforts on the island nation, which, because of its geographical location, the unique evolutionary trajectory of its native species, and its history of human settlement, offers unusual and unexpected insights into habitat recovery and the role of traditional belief systems in protecting various animal species. Sodikoff argues that the accelerated pace of mass extinction compels ways of thinking that exceed the more familiar time frames of the near past and the near present to engage the far more encompassing scale of geological time. The approaches to conservation that this vastly amplified temporal framework entails are those that make use of the metaphors of cosmology and resort to scientific intervention to restore various animal species by means of resurrection projects. Indeed, on Madagascar, mythical thinking and traditional folklore prove productive of a local knowledge that aids researchers and conservationists in locating Lazarus species, that is, animals that are believed to have gone extinct but are revealed to be surviving in the depths of various habitats. Conservationists have relied on taboos against the killing of certain animals in order to preserve native and non-native species alike, but the force attached to these beliefs has waned in the face of modern techniques of resource extraction and habits of consumption. As Sodikoff's chapter and those by others demonstrate, modern science, in the search for limits to the destructive tendencies of economic development, has learned to be pragmatic with respect to traditional cosmological beliefs, seeking to extract from them warnings against human complacency and hubris.

The conventional wisdom, or even the governing ideology, of American democracy in the age of globalization combines the cautious skepticism of traditionalist conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke toward radical social and political change with the belief that free market capitalism brings about the optimal social and economic outcomes for modern society. In Unintended Consequences and the Epistemology of Fraud in Dickens and Hayek, Eleanor Courtemanche reveals that the system of beliefs that legitimates the pursuit of rational self-interest relies quite heavily on faith for its coherence. The defense of free market economics in the work of Friedrich Hayek brings together the warnings of Burke against reckless attempts to reshape existing institutions, the optimistic attitude of Adam Smith that individual selfishness has beneficial consequences for society as a whole, and the belief that a spontaneous order underlies the complexity of modern society. As Courtemanche points out, Hayek's system involves a certain selective skepticism—the category of unintended consequences applies to misguided government interventions in a free market that harm economic activity but not to economic activity undertaken in the spirit of fraud and deceit. The manner whereby the pursuit of self-interest works to the benefit of the greater society is left unexplained as well, as Hayek presents it as an effect of spontaneous order. As the global financial crisis makes clear, a theory of economics that, like Hayek's, does not address the possibility of fraud is limited indeed. Courtemanche looks to the novels of Dickens for a more comprehensive and truthful exploration of the mechanisms of economic fraud and the workings of unintended consequences, in which unexpectedly negative outcomes go beyond misguided benevolence and serve instead to underscore the condition of blindness and the possibility of hubris that attend all human endeavors.

While many of the contributors to this volume look to narrative as a way of drawing attention to the shortcomings and limitations of much contemporary economic thought, literary scholar Michael Tratner takes on what he considers to be the uncritical dependence of economists on stories to account for shifts in consumer demand. The near meltdown of the global economy has sparked a revival of interest in the theories of John Maynard Keynes, as governments of both the Left and the Right across the industrialized world have undertaken extraordinary measures to rescue their crippled financial systems. But as Tratner warns, the efforts to revive Keynesian economics in recent years have disregarded certain vital elements of Keynes's thought. Chief among these is Keynes's idea of animal spirits, which refers to the irrational choices and decisions that are behind both market crashes and economic growth. For Keynes, the sources of irrationality in the markets have distinctly corporeal resonances—they relate to spontaneous urges to satisfy bodily needs. For the economists of the neo-Keynesian revival, irrationality issues not from the body but from false information, namely the misleading stories that people tell each other about the economy. The neo-Keynesian economists calling for stimulus measures to revive demand, Tratner argues, err in equating the present economic crisis with the one confronted by Keynes. In Keynes's time the problem was one of low levels of consumption, for which the cure was fulfilling the appetites of strong, desire-filled working class bodies, while in our time the cause of the breakdown is a contraction in credit. The financialization of the economy corresponds to the rise of information as the dominant category of economics and reflects the troubling irrelevance of the body and labor in the postindustrial economy. Tratner closes his chapter with a remarkable reading of the science fiction blockbuster Avatar, which, while ostensibly calling for a return to nature, in fact portrays nature functioning as a kind of central bank that relays vital information to sentient life-forms.

The acknowledgment of indebtedness as an elementary condition of social existence is said to entail coming to terms with an essential state of interdependence. But a policy of deepening and heightening one's level of interdependence can expose all participants to unexpected crises and intractable conflicts, which may provoke them into undertaking courses of action that bring harm to them all. Relations of mutual dependence in trade can bring wealth and well-being to those who enter into them, yet they can also create dangerous imbalances, especially when the interests, needs, and habits of the parties cannot be reconciled. Donald Hester examines the points of vulnerability and friction that have arisen in the relationship between the world's two leading economies in China and the United States: The Bonds of Debt. The meteoric rise of China from feudal poverty, war with Japan, and the catastrophic policies of Mao to become the globe's second-largest economy has been perhaps the most decisive historical development since the collapse of communism. The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, such as the opening of the Shenzhen free enterprise zone in 1979, have enabled China to amass the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, while accumulating a trade surplus with the United States that rose to record levels in 2010 at $273.1 billion. As Hester points out, such a massive trade imbalance cannot form the basis of a new status quo. China may decide to cut back substantially on its purchase of asset-backed securities to finance consumption in the United States because of the fear of US default, leading to a fundamental transformation of the US consumer economy. Or the United States may choose to inflate its currency, resolving the problem of the trade deficit while inflicting severe harm on its economy. Less disruptive measures would entail a rise in consumer spending in China coupled with an increase in the savings rate in the United States. The situation is however complicated by the presence of conflicts that go beyond the commercial relationship between the two countries—the security of Taiwan, the crisis of entitlement spending in the United States, the need of the Chinese government to maintain high rates of growth as well as a deflated currency for the sake of avoiding social unrest, and the competitive nature of capitalism itself, in which countries must compete with each other for scarce resources.

In Debt's Moral, Kennan Ferguson challenges the conventional framework for understanding debt. One influential conception regards debt as a wholly economic category, for which the question of moral evaluation is altogether an irrelevant concern. The