The Ledger: On Debts We Cannot Count

Every profession deforms its practitioners, and economics deforms us toward the countable. This column — the first of a series on the political economy of ordinary things — begins with a confession of the deformation: the most consequential debts in public life are the ones our ledgers cannot see, and the invisibility is not an accident. It is a design choice, renewable annually, called a budget.

Consider maintenance, the fiscal world's great unperson. A new bridge is a ribbon, a press release, a line of capital expenditure with a minister attached. The same bridge's slow decay appears nowhere: deferred maintenance is not booked as borrowing, though it is borrowing in its purest form — consumption of an asset by those who will not pay for its restoration. Engineers' societies tot up the arrears in the trillions, economy by economy. No treasury prints the number beside the debt clock, because no election was ever lost over corrosion.

The same blindness governs the human balance sheet. An economy that trains a nurse and then burns her out in five years has consumed capital as surely as if it had scrapped a hospital wing, but the depletion appears in no account — the training was an expense, the exhaustion is free, and the replacement will be an expense again. Care work performed unpaid, mostly by women, holds up every formal labour market on earth and is recorded, with impressive consistency, as zero.

The point is not that everything should be priced; some things are debased by pricing, and the column will get to them. The point is narrower and harder: what the ledger omits, the politics forgets, and what the politics forgets, it eventually pays for at emergency rates. The corroded bridge is re-bought at panic prices. The burned-out workforce is re-trained in a shortage. Invisible debts are not forgiven. They are refinanced, always, on worse terms.

A civilization is, among other things, a set of accounting conventions — a decision about what counts. Ours count admirably in the narrow band and hum with silence outside it. The task of this column is to sit with the silences and, where possible, put figures to them. The figures will be wrong. They will still be less wrong than zero.