Deconstructing Public Debt: Who Owes What to Whom?

Richard E. Wagner ()
Additional contact information
Richard E. Wagner: George Mason University

Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics, 2023, vol. 40, issue 1, No 2, 5-17

Abstract: Abstract This essay memorializes Giuseppe Eusepi’s contribution to political economy by refining the theme he and I sketched in 2017 in Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. There, we claimed that it was illusory to describe democratic governments as being indebted. We did not advance our claim flippantly or lightly. To the contrary, we advanced it in full seriousness. In this essay, I dig beneath the surface of national indebtedness to examine just who owes what to whom when people refer to public debt. When this is done, public debt is seen to resemble a shell game in that repeated references to “our” debt camouflage the web of fiscal advantage and handicap that public borrowing spreads within a society. It is this pattern of advantages and handicaps more than the aggregate fact of indebtedness that is surely the most significant and most neglected feature of public debt.

Keywords: entangled political economy; political coalitions; perceptions of cost; systemic lying; political shell games; s: D23; D72; H11; H63; P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41412-022-00133-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:homoec:v:40:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s41412-022-00133-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41412

DOI: 10.1007/s41412-022-00133-8

Access Statistics for this article

Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics is currently edited by M.J. Holler, M. Kocher and K.K. Sieberg

More articles in Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().