Viral Debt: The Production and Reproduction of Economic Vulnerability

Challenging how social scientists, policymakers, legal scholars, and the public examine household debts and wellbeing, Viral Debt traces how debt moves within and across households to communities and institutions, with devastating effects.

Debt is not merely a contractual condition, it is also an inherently unequal relationship between creditor and debtor that can exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities while creating new ones. With a roster of leading social science and socio-legal scholars, this book shows how debt – like a contagion – works systematically across economic and social structures and geographies, demonstrating the ways in which policy has exacerbated the problem of debt through policy choices.

This volume offers urgent answers by drawing on quantitative data about household indebtedness, credit and debt policies, and local court actions, together with qualitative research.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Jodi Gardner is a Professor and the Brian Coote Chair in Private Law at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on the relationship between private law and social policy. Jodi was formerly a Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge.

Mia Gray is a Professor of Economic Geography at Cambridge University. She has published extensively on contemporary austerity, debt, and regional economies. She is also one of the editors of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.

Frederick F. Wherry is the Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Founder of the Debt Collection Lab. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of nine books, including Credit Where It’s Due and Money Talks. His forthcoming book is What We Owe: How Debt Came for All of Us and How We Get Free.