Social Democracy Suppressed Series presents:
The Bonds of Kinship: Intergenerational Debt and Familial Wealth in the Neoliberal Era
Melinda Cooper, University of Sidney
Thursday, April 27, 6pm, at 79 Fifth Ave Room 1618
“We want an economy where our debts are to our friends, families, and communities – and not to the 1%,”declares the Strike Debt movement. But what if the contemporary economy of so-called “personal debt” is entirely premised on our intimate obligations to each other, particularlyatthelevelofthefamily?ThispaperconsiderstheevolutionofstudentdebtintheUS (with some comparative detours via the Australian case) to argue that the progressive transfer of de cit spending and hence investment in“human capital”from the state to the individual has necessarily involved an intensi cation of intergenerational and familial bonds. Today, student debt is increasingly a family a air, keeping parents, children and relatives enmeshed in webs of economic obligation for decades on end. Since there is no obvious source of collateral for student debt, private loans secured by parents or unsecured federal loans taken out by parents (Parent PLUS loans) transform the intimate dependencies of family into a form of substitute collateral – comparable to the forms of“social collateral” that anthropologists see at work in micro nance.Inshort,wherepublicinvestmentinhighereducationforabriefmomentactedas an“inheritancetax”liberatingstudentsfromtheirdependenceonfamilywealth,theprivatedebt model of college funding allows all students to attend college while simultaneously reinserting them in the economic obligations of family.