Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism by Miranda Joseph (review)

According to its cover blurb, Debt to Society provides an “innovative and ambitious scholarly intervention across a wide swath of fields, with much fresh thinking and provocative reframing in every one.” The volume purports to discuss debt to society and debt in the accounting sense, but does very little of either. Perhaps a better title would be “Random Thoughts on Prisons and Gender Studies.” As such, the book is not really about business history, or even business itself, other than the fact that Chapter 5 acknowledges that universities should be operated as business entities. The author holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in Modern Thought and Literature. She is a faculty member in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, where she teaches seminars in feminist, Marxist, poststructuralist, and queer theory and cultural studies. Appropriately, much of this volume is centered on feminism and the works of Karl Marx.

The book opens with a statement that “good credit is sexy” (p. ix), as the importance of credit ratings is noted. This then leads to discussion of a criminal’s (or anyone else’s) debt to society, as in the case of Wall Street titans who are not being indicted for their financial crimes. The first chapter discusses the articulation of debt as “depersonalization by way of quantification,” and asserts that this was what led to the 2008 financial crisis. Joseph makes a valid point that debt and credit are the same thing, but credit is good and debt is bad. Credit is based on, or is synonymous with, “trust.” Some of the author’s metaphors were interesting, such as that crime is “an overdrawing of one’s account in the social contract bank” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement in his “I have a dream” speech wherein he says that American society issued a promissory note to blacks, but paid it off with a bad check.

The history of credit reporting (such as Dun & Bradstreet) in Chapter 2 was interesting, as was Joseph’s explanation of how plantation owners were able to effectively re-enslave blacks during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Accounting records of plantation stores facilitated re-enslavement by turning black farmers into debt peons. Furthermore, criminal surety laws allowed whites to pay fines for convicted blacks, who would then be obliged to work off their involuntarily acquired debts. Another point of interest was the discussion of restorative justice as an alternative to incarceration. The victim and the offender get together and come to a valuation that the victim receives from the perpetrator. This alternative to jail is argued as being better for the victim, in that restitution is received. Community service sentences are one example of such restorative justice. The second chapter concludes with a discussion of social accounting and auditing and the problems encountered because of externalities that are not based on market prices (such as environmental damages).

The third chapter contains an interesting discussion of Brett Williams’s work, in which she pointed out that credit card companies cannot make money lending to people with good credit. Instead, liberalized usury laws allow for higher interest rates that permit profitable lending to marginal borrowers. There is also mention of the stage play, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, which provides a few examples of the problems of modern accounting. Joseph also laments the evolution from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, but she fails to note the role of the Financial Accounting Standards Board and changing accounting standards on the change in business practices regarding approaches to retirement planning. She also does not look at the accounting value of lives or of body parts, both of which seemed to be natural extensions of what she was discussing. Despite a chapter title of “Accounting for Time: The Entrepreneurial Subject in Crisis,” the meat of...