Economic contagion and a pro-poor social epidemiology

The world built by financial integration allows crises that move quickly from one country to another, destroying the lives of people who are vulnerable to poverty. Witness the remarkable speed of the crisis that began as a home mortgage crisis in the United States in 2007 but quickly generalized into an economic crisis around the world. When such contagion breaks out, the poor typically suffer disproportionately. Even after a recovery, the lasting effects, the hysteresis, can trap an entire generation in poverty, which they might otherwise have avoided. The poverty produced by means of economic contagion is plausibly an example of what Iris Marion Young calls a structural injustice. Contagion is a powerful metaphor. One worthy theoretical project of global justice would be a pro-poor social epidemiology of this contagion. Such a pro-poor epidemiology would have many elements. In this paper, I limit my efforts to just two: Explaining the key role of crisis transition mechanisms in producing contagion; and in light of that, discussing how best to understand responsibility for reforming the institutions of the global economy in order to remove or mitigate the effects of crisis transition mechanisms. Although the contagion that spreads poverty can be understood, following Young, as a structural injustice, her social connection model of responsibility is less adequate for understanding responsibility in this case.