by Andrew Ross
about Andrew Ross
Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is the author of Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, and Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.
Debt
In everyday speech, debt describes an economic relationship, and typically applies to the money or assets owed to creditors by individuals, households, governments and nation states. But it has long been used metaphorically to refer to non-economic moral obligations as well. A good deed done on someone’s behalf is often said to be owed a similar response, in repayment of a debt. Incarceration and other forms of punishment for wrongful acts are similarly cast as the method by which the accused pay their “debt to society.” In most cultures, the moral injunction behind this expectation of reciprocity is so strong that its violation is akin to a taboo; in German, the word for debt is “schuld,” the same as that used for “guilt.” For bankers and other lenders, payback morality is a primary deterrent against default, more powerful than the prospect of a ruined credit score. At the same time, many cultures regard moneylending itself as immoral, and synonymous with the word “usury,” excessive profiteering, or the taking of something for nothing. Christian scripture explains marital relations as involving duties owed by spouses to each other, which Augustine, in _De Bono Coniugali_, described as a condition of “mutual servitude.” Accordingly,...
Climate Change
Climate change is a significant shift, over a long period of time, in the statistical profile of weather patterns. For most of geologic history, natural factors—solar radiation, continental drift, oceanic circulation, volcanic activity—have forced these shifts. In the period since the late nineteenth century, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) displays the impact of industrial activity, largely through the concentration of greenhouse gases generated by the burning of fossil fuels. AGW can be seen as one component of the “Anthropocene,” an unofficial chronological term that acknowledges the significant influence of human behavior on the Earth’s ecosystems. Most scientists who favor the naming of this new geological era date its onset to the commencement of the Industrial Revolution, but some backdate it to the rise of agriculture, when humans began to transform land use and biodiversity on a large and global scale. While many human activities are destructive of local ecosystems, emissions of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide and methane above all—command most attention today because of their contribution to rising temperatures. Documented consequences of AGW include the retreat of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice, ocean acidification, soil salinization, desertification, habitat inundation, mega-drought, loss of food security, mass species extinctions, and the more frequent occurrence...