Editorial Note: On Margaret Atwood's Payback

The five pieces following are less reviews of, than engagements with, Margaret Atwood's book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2008). An economic recession seems an appropriate time to take up the late Paul Feyerabend's call, made in our Spring 1992 issue, for papers on alternatives to both capitalism and "totalitarian economy." We have done so once before in this format. " 'The Land Shall Be Divided by Lot': Alternative Economics" (Common Knowledge 2.3 [Winter 1993]: 119-40) was a set of engagements with Jacob Neusner's book The Economics of the Mishnah and Pope John Paul II's "social encyclical," Centesimus Annus. Given the scope and magnitude of the financial crisis beginning in 2007, those essays may have a renewed interest today. They are: Zbigniew Nosowski, "For a Society Worthy of a Human Person"; Martin C. Spechler, "Post-Technocratic Economics"; and Charles P. Kindleberger, "Wealth and Moral Sentiments." Those three reviews urged—as this new cluster, eighteen years later, does as well—that economics should be understood as an aspect of culture, rather than culture considered an aspect of "the economy."