Challenging how social scientists, policymakers, legal scholars, and the public examine household debts and wellbeing, Viral Debt traces how debt moves within and across households to communities and institutions, with devastating effects.
Debt is not merely a contractual condition, it is also an inherently unequal relationship between creditor and debtor that can exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities while creating new ones. With a roster of leading social science and socio-legal scholars, this book shows how debt – like a contagion – works systematically across economic and social structures and geographies, demonstrating the ways in which policy has exacerbated the problem of debt through policy choices.
This volume offers urgent answers by drawing on quantitative data about household indebtedness, credit and debt policies, and local court actions, together with qualitative research.
Challenging how social scientists, policymakers, legal scholars, and the public examine household debts and wellbeing, Viral Debt traces how debt moves within and across households to communities and institutions, with devastating effects.
Arvustused
Debt does not accumulate by accident; it ramps up by design, settling unevenly across the social landscape, blighting the lives and futures of all but a wealthy elite. Debt has gone viral; finally, a single book explains how, when, where, and why that happened.
Susan Smith, Professor of Geography and President of the British Academy
Situating debt within a conceptual framework of virus and contagion, this book offers a new approach to the study of debt in todays society. In the wake of the global pandemic, this timely and important work deserves to be read and discussed widely.
Nicholas Gane, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick
This volume offers a novel framing of viral debt and how treating debt as a virus helps us understand bad debts. They bring patently to light how indebtedness transcends individual choices and faults. This is an important book for the time we are in!
Nina Bandelj, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
1. Viral Debt: Origins, Pathways, and Consequences, Frederick F. Wherry,
Mia Gray and Jodi Gardner; Part I: What Makes Households Vulnerable to Viral
Debt;
2. How Welfare and Credit Regimes Shape Economic Policies During Times
of Crisis: The Case of Covid-19, Marie-Lou Laprise and Andreas Wiedemann;
3.
Viral Debts and the Economic Storytelling about Crisis, Johnna Montgomerie;
4. Unpacking Neoliberalism, Financialisation and Housing Class Inequality:
Debt Virality, Policy Anomalies, and the Case of Mortgage Prisoners, Matthew
Sparkes; Part II: Experience of Viral Spread;
5. How Eviction Protections
Created New Debt Problems, Peter Hepburn, Jacob Haas, Emily Lemmerman, and
Matthew Desmond;
6. The ABC of Growing Debt and Inequality: Austerity, Brexit
and Covid-19, Karen Rowlingson;
7. How Did COVID-19 Feed into Later Life
Financial Vulnerability in the UK?, Hilary Cooper; Part III: Responding to
the viral debt aftermath;
8. State and personal debt, Covid and tax
responses, Andy Lymer;
9. Ripple Effect of Debt and Health, John Ford, Anita
Patel, and Anna Starling;
10. Medicine or Poison? Fintech, Racial Inequities,
and Bad Debt, Mae Watson-Grote and Frederick F. Wherry;
11. Sunset Clauses,
False Dawns: Crises and Possibilities for Debt Cancellation Through Law,
Joseph Spooner
Jodi Gardner is a Professor and the Brian Coote Chair in Private Law at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on the relationship between private law and social policy. Jodi was formerly a Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge.
Mia Gray is a Professor of Economic Geography at Cambridge University. She has published extensively on contemporary austerity, debt, and regional economies. She is also one of the editors of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.
Frederick F. Wherry is the Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Founder of the Debt Collection Lab. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of nine books, including Credit Where Its Due and Money Talks. His forthcoming book is What We Owe: How Debt Came for All of Us and How We Get Free.
