Debt and the Politics of Numbers: Hegemonic Numbers, Political Numbers, Ordinary Numbers

ABSTRACT

Numbers are both shaped by and constitutive of a certain vision of the world, and household debt is no exception. Financialized capitalism relies on hegemonic numbers that serve the economic and political interests of state government and the financial industry, which see and measure debt as a market ripe for development. In the face of this, it is crucial to build alternative numbers. The political numbers of debt conceive debt as a power relation, and quantify the degrees of financial exploitation that hegemonic numbers are blind to. Ordinary numbers seek to reflect what matters the most to ordinary people. They conceive of debt as a relationship of social interdependence, which can be a source of power, hierarchy and exploitation, but also of mutual aid, reciprocity and dignity. Far from functioning in silos, hegemonic numbers, political numbers and ordinary numbers have shifting boundaries. This article, based on twenty years of research in India conducted by a Franco-Indian team of economists and anthropologists, exposes and contributes to the politics of numbers in the field of debt.

KEYWORDS:

• Debt
• method
• anthropology
• politics of numbers
• India

JEL CODES:

• B54
• 018
• P00
• Z1

This article is referred to by:

Commentary on Guérin and Venkatasubramanian ‘Debt and the Politics of Numbers’

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of the symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and we are immensely grateful to the organizers of the symposium — Teresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey and Gustav Peebles — for their invitation and their constructive suggestions. The comments of all symposium participants were very helpful. This paper also owes much to the exchanges with and reviews of Florent Bédécarrats, Marion Fourcade, Deborah James, Nicolas Lainez, Jeanne Lazarus, Benjamin Lemoine, Susana Narotzky, Federico Neiburg, Horacio Ortiz, Fareen Parvez, Boris Samuel and Jing Wang. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and the editor for his patience and meticulous proofreading.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://odriis.hypotheses.org/1.

2 Note that these comments are strangely reminiscent of the behaviorist morality of contemporary development economists, who see the absence of a vision of the future as an explanation for the high propensity of the poor to take on debt and their acceptability of high interest rates (Bédécarrats, Guérin, and Roubaud 2020a).

3 ‘Unbanked' are defined as opposed to ‘banked' individuals, defined as adult owners of an account with a regulated financial institution (bank, credit union, microfinance institution, post office, or mobile money service provider).

4 The All India Debt and Investment Survey focuses on households. The National Family Health Survey includes gender-disaggregated financial data, but focuses on bank accounts and microcredit. The Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, which is periodically conducted by an independent private organization, is the most exhaustive survey of consumer practices today, including finance. Here again, the informal sector is missing.

5 This includes CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor), a network of development organizations hosted by the World Bank that actively disseminates good practices in financial inclusion, Alliance for Financial Inclusion (owned and led by member central banks and financial regulatory institutions), UNSGSA (United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development).

6 We stratified the sample by system ecotype (village) and by caste (household) and increased the sample size over time to avoid the aging of respondents. Full details are given on the Observatory website, along with data and a user guide (https://odriis.hypotheses.org/).

7 We summarize here the salient figures described in detail in other publications (Reboul, Guérin, and Nordman 2021; Guérin, Venkatasubramanian, and Kumar 2023).

8 There are, however, some successful examples, even within an institution like the World Bank, one of the main sources of hegemonic data on the Global South. This is the case, for example, of the economist Vijayendra Rao, who is constantly seeking to improve measurement and quantification by taking into account the robustness of social relations, whether in terms of festivals, domestic violence, or deliberations at local municipal assemblies (Rao 2002).