Public Debt and Anthropy: Who Really Pays for Disorder?

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 reroute 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.