Paying Your Debt to Society

In this chapter, the author argues the logic of quid pro quo functions as shorthand for this form of transactionality, lending it legitimacy through its apparent commonsensicality. She focuses on logic of quid pro quo has crept into national education and welfare policy, as well as into arrangements for so-called "transactional voluntary work" across public and private sectors. The report on "transactional voluntary work" shows how the same logic is increasingly applied in wider society, enhancing its purported self-evidentness. The generalization of student debt reconfigures both the future and freedom as spaces governed not by an "ethics of possibility," fostering a "capacity to aspire," but by an "ethics of probability" that demands an attitude of constant calculation. The loans constitute a powerful surveillance mechanism in imposing a long-lasting duty to report one's income to the lending agency, even when not owing tax or living abroad.