I
At the beginning of my career, I wanted to write a book on poverty, defense and environment. A centering focus on poverty today? More likely, it’d be Inequality. Today, “defense”? More likely, International Security. “Environment”? Better to think in terms of the Climate Emergency, Species Extinction and Biodiversity Loss. The change, in this recasting, has been twofold: the today’s topics not only differ, they are now capitalized as extreme.
In the spirit of asking ourselves, “What’s missing in this recent way of thinking?,” I want to suggest that topic of the public debt remains hugely important but perennially uncapitalized in ways that help us rethink current policy urgencies and priorities.
II
If I am reading historians Istvan Hont and Michael Sonenscher correctly, 18th century thinkers wrestled again and again with the constitutional means for reining in the bad-side of public debt (e.g., rulers use the monies to war), while promoting the good-side (e.g., rulers build the infrastructure Adam Smith himself saw necessary for human betterment).
What interests me here, however, is when did forecasting public finances become so much a part of the government remit that the public debt has become so predictably unwieldly? Does the noise that comes with contemporary forecasting drown out the other messages sent by the public debt, namely, what is it to need something so much that it cannot be regulated in the ways desired?
How might this work out?
III
Constitutional proposals to ensure balanced budgets have come and gone; actual constitutional amendments, e.g. Germany’s restricting budget deficits to no greater than a certain percent of GDP, are suspended or circumvented. Green golden rules are proposed today that “would exclude any increase in net green public investment from the fiscal indicators used to measure compliance with fiscal rules,” recognizing however that “by allowing green spending to be financed by borrowing. . .could undermine public debt sustainability”.
How then do we get out of the much-touted messes of public debt? Short answer: We don’t. We recast by first differentiating and bringing granularity into the analysis of public debts, plural.
You can start anywhere. (Isn’t that the methodological advantage of constructing everything to be connected to everything else?) For my part, I start with aquaculture.
The negatives of commercial, government, and donor-funded aquaculture are well-documented. Yet even where true as far as it goes, those insights have to be pushed into the distribution of really-existing cases. Are shrimp aquaculture projects off the shores of Louisiana and Bangladesh negative in the same ways? No, because context must matter, or it wouldn’t be aquaculture as actually practiced over a run of different cases. To take an empirical generalization—more roads lead to more traffic congestion—and elevate it to Downs Law—peak-hour congestion rises to meet its capacity maximum—is to willfully ignore those cases where the latter instances just do not hold in real time.
IV
I want to underscore the methodological point of the public debt being granularized into public debts experienced in the varied here’s and now’s.
Doing so insists on use of the present tense throughout the analysis. “Present tense compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now.” It is to insist on the context-specific relevance in policy and management of contingency and immediacy, direct and near-instantaneous, over any kind of pretense of foreclosure by human conclusions, judgments and pronouncements.
This real-time pivot renders some very interesting “if-then” clauses. For example, if cities are killing the planet, then they also continue to the sites of real-time demographic transition where poorer women experience lower their birth rates and increase their education and incomes as well as serving as the locus of many democratic movements and the source of much of our art, culture, commerce and technology. If the public debt is our ruination, then we have to push that point further to how public debts are experienced, here and now.
VI
So what? Well, carry on with the other if-then possibilities until you find something that sticks by way of policy relevance:
Then public debts are like keystone ecosystems, the way groundwater systems are central to other dependent terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Or, then these debts are experienced like those wonderful recordings of performers whose grunts and equipment sounds we routinely overlook or ignore, like when portions of a painter’s palette are more pleasing than the painting. Or, then public debts are the infrastructures experienced as the social property of the propertyless, who know best when and how to depreciate their assets.
. . .
Ideas and wording drawn from:
Darvas, Z. (2022) “Legal options for a green golden rule in the European Union’s fiscal
framework.” Policy Contribution 13/2022, Bruegel (accessed online at https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/PC%2013%202022.pdf)
Dyk, Silke van and M. Kip (2023). “Rethinking social rights as social property: alternatives to private property, and the democratisation of public politics.” Critical Sociology (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205231195378)
Hont, I. (2005). Jealousy of Trade. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Johnson, N. (2023). “Times of interest: longue-durée rates and capitalist stabilization.” (accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii143/articles/nic-johnson-times-of-interest)
Kornbluh, A. (2024). “Immediacy [excerpt]; ‘The prose poetry upsurge’, Protean (accessed online at https://proteanmag.com/2024/02/08/immediacy-excerpt/)
Mammola, S. et al (2023). “Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem.” Global Change Biology (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17066)
Paprocki, K. (2022). “Anticipatory ruination.” The Journal of Peasant Studies (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2022.2113068)
Sonenscher, M. (2007). Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Vallée, S. (2023). “Germany has narrowly swerved budget disaster – but its debt taboo still threatens Europe.” (accessed online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/13/germany-budget-debt-europe-constitution-crisis).
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 