Public Debt and Anthropy: Who Really Pays for Disorder?

Anthropy is the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it.

Mainstream analyses of public debt focus on volume, sustainability ratios, and fiscal trajectories, leaving unanswered a prior question: who actually absorbs the disorder that debt displaces, and through what mechanisms does that displacement remain invisible? This paper applies the framework of anthropy — the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it — to French public debt. It identifies four simultaneous transfer circuits (temporal, social, political, and monetary) whose cascading sequence constitutes a single mechanism of disorder displacement. Three criteria distinguish anthropic transfer from standard intertemporal smoothing: a cascade of circuits activated by the same fiscal episode; a systematic asymmetry between mobile actors, shielded from the shock, and captive actors, who absorb it; and an active process of invisibilisation whereby technocratic discourse reframes political choices as accounting constraints. Drawing on institutional data (INSEE, Cour des comptes, DREES, ECB) and three comparative configurations — Japan, Norway, Greece — the analysis recasts public debt not as a stock to be reduced, but as a configuration for allocating disorder.