The Public Good: Austerity, Infrastructure and a Social Calculus

Professor Laura Bear

Lecture Abstract

Using a film and ethnography from the Hooghly River in India this lecture explores the links between austerity and financialized infrastructure. It also proposes alternatives to these policies founded on a social calculus drawn from the ethics of waterscape workers and their families. Current infrastructure initiatives across the world are described as an ‘alternative’ to austerity and a nationalist riposte to globalisation. But they are in fact part of the same historical process--a gradual movement of fiscal control from governments to central banks and financial markets. This began with the financialization of sovereign debt in the 1980s-90s, which led to austerity within the public sector. These policies enabled the erosion of state-provided public works and the direct promotion of precarious private sector work for the state. In addition they led to the growth of public private partnerships to move costs off government books. Ultimately because public works have been starved of capital governments are now turning to financial markets to solve a problem that has been generated by relying on them to manage economies. How could an alternative social calculus and a politics of citizens’ debt audits allow us to reclaim the public commons of state resources? What new forms of the public good could we generate?

Biography

Laura Bear is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of The Jadu House (Doubleday 2000), Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia 2007) and Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River (Stanford University Press 2015). She has also written many articles on the themes of time, the public good and austerity. She serves on the advisory groups of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE and the Jubilee Debt Campaign.