Public debt and anthropy: who really pays for disorder?

• public debt
• anthropy
• temporal transfer
• public finance
• France

Public debt is not a simple accounting balance: it is a mechanism of temporal and social entropic transfer. This working paper applies the framework of anthropy to French public finances.

Debt as transfer

The debate on public debt typically focuses on the question of amount: how much? The framework of anthropy displaces the question: who pays? Debt is not merely a number — it is a transfer mechanism operating along two simultaneous dimensions.

Along the temporal axis, debt defers the cost of present disorder to future generations. Current expenditure is financed by a levy on the future, whose beneficiaries are not consulted and will inherit commitments without having participated in the decisions that bind them.

Along the social axis, debt does not weigh equally on all groups. The most mobile households — fiscally, geographically — have avoidance capacities that captive groups do not. The real cost of debt is therefore borne asymmetrically.

Application to French public finances

This text examines French public finances through the anthropic grid. It shows that standard budgetary mechanisms — borrowing, refinancing, amortisation — function as temporal transfer devices that externalise the political cost of adjustment toward periods when current decision-makers will no longer be in office.

The analysis highlights the social dimension of transfer: the groups bearing the bulk of debt’s cost — through inflation, indirect taxation, degradation of public services — are not those who benefited most from it.

Beyond the accounting balance

The framework of anthropy does not propose a moral reading of debt. It aims to make visible the transfer mechanism that underlies it, and to pose the question that accounting frameworks do not formulate: not “how much does debt cost?” but “who bears its cost, and through what mediations does that cost become invisible?”