Society legitimately cannot function without debt. I agree giving people predatory “micro loans” for groceries is dystopian but every society that has discovered agriculture has also discovered the concept of debt because it’s a natural consequence of an economic order so tied to seasonal cycles. Interest is also not bad, and every society that has developed debt has also quickly developed interest. Societies that have religious prohibitions or taboos against interest find workarounds because it’s proven to be a critical part of how economics works. Personally I am glad that I was able to buy a house for hundreds of thousands of dollars I don’t have yet because I will be able to pay off that in time and I appreciate that the bank is willing to lend me that money for such a long time at a relatively low rate of return for them. The Soviet Union even had banks that offered loans with interest but they were run by the State. It’s kind of unavoidable.
Many societies also develop a system of redistribution or debt forgiveness. It’s known that too much debt accumulation in too few hands cause increasingly bigger issues or that circumstances change. But there are always those that need to learn the lesson again.
Not many societies developed a system of redistribution. We live in one of the extremely few that have, and it took a lot of smart people a lot of time (and infighting) to get into something that works.
Why was your house worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because we use debt. How do you think people lived for thousands of years? Home mortgages weren’t a normal thing until like 100 years ago
Societies without it found workarounds, because it’s easy. It’s tempting. It’s a money dupe glitch combined with gambling. If anyone uses it, they get an insurmountable advantage over all players who don’t. It’s moloch, it’s the demon of racing to the bottom
Yes. And FYI, micro and macro economics are bullshit. They’re easily digestible lies that don’t hold up to the real world. There’s real studies of economics going on at higher levels, but what gets boosted is essentially propaganda to justify political positions
Have you ever had a good history class, where instead of myths written by the winners they told the stories of people and how they interact? Where they break down the system into players, and go over the same event from many points of view? All the very human drives and politics, the infinite compromises that get grandfathered in, the true analysis of “how did we get here”?
The world is made up of systems. I build, analyze, and fix systems, it’s what I do. The only way to analyze a system or a change is to run it through, turning it over in your mind from one perspective after another, until you start to understand how it fits together
Know what every society in the past has done? Collapse. The ones with debt collapse after about 250 years, every time. It’s an inevitability… Some societies fail into the next iteration instead of going through a dark age, but they all collapse.
Debt creates a boom bust cycle that grows exponentially. It’s inherently unstable.
But some failed from external factors. From disease and colonization. There’s one empire that I find very interesting in that regard…the incas
Maybe they would’ve collapsed too, but their system seems a lot more stable to me. And I don’t think it had any idea of debt, of selling the future
Do you own a home? Do you think that’s a worthwhile thing to do? Without debt, home ownership is basically completely out of reach for most people despite the fact that many people will earn enough money to buy a house in their lifetime. It allows you to pay for money now with money later. Debt is legitimately an extremely important part of an economy- there’s a reason it’s been invented by pretty much every agricultural society in history. As with most financial instruments, it started with farmers - it costs money to plant and grow a crop of grain, but that crop doesn’t produce money until you sell it at harvest time so you have an issue where if last year’s crop didn’t go so well due to weather and you are low on cash in the spring, you can’t afford to plant next year’s crop and get out of the hole. So borrowing money is the easiest way.
This also works with businesses and governments. Say you want to buy a machine that prints designs on T shirts because you want to sell T shirts. You can’t afford the machine now, but you believe that you’d be able to with the money you could make from your T shirt business, so you go to the bank and convince them of the plan, and they give you money up front. Without debt, that T shirt business couldn’t happen unless you got a bunch of investors to help you out.
There are many examples of this being essentially the status quo in many places and historical eras and essentially it just makes housing availability worse since only the ultra wealthy can afford to build expensive structures and they just accumulate more wealth and power. Think about in the middle ages when a local lord would have to foot the bill to build townhouses completely up front but he and his descendants would retain ownership of them and demand payment to live in them for hundreds of years to come. There are places where access to credit is poor today where people basically live in makeshift shacks if they don’t rent because they can’t afford to buy houses otherwise. There are a lot of ways to fix land ownership and exploitation by landlords, but historically speaking, this was not it. I know nobody likes living in debt and debt can be used for exploitation, but completely abolishing credit simply will not have good outcomes as a whole.
Feudalism had a lot of good points structurally, replace the lord with public servants and I don’t see the problem. The city builds the housing, and it becomes part of the tax revenue forever. If the city prices basic housing too high, economic activity falls, tax revenue falls, and the city declines
Shanty towns aren’t good, but we haven’t fixed the problem, we just have homelessness now
Feudalism didn’t make us destroy the entire world, did it?
What were doing clearly isn’t working, maybe there’s something to democratic feudalism. Seriously, it fixes a lot of issues and all I see are engineering problems
And I’m saying no one should do that, things should grow slowly and organically. It’s like trees, you can turbo charge their growth and get a board in a decade instead of a century, but the wood is incomparably worse in every way
If you let anyone do it, everyone will be forced to, despite the risk, to be competitive
I mean even in nature, like tree, everything is a competition. In a forest if you are a tree and can’t outgrow or even catch up with everyone then you’re fallen behind and risking being covered by everyone else, eventually you’ll become weak and susceptible to termite and disease. Your example kinda fall apart, yeah?
Same in business. It’s really about sustainable growth and able to catch up, and also secure your own stability in the market. What if your machine broke down and it’s very expensive to repair or replace? What if your current equipment can’t catching up with the demand? What if your landlord wanted to sell the shop and you wanted to secure your location instead of moving, which also cost time and money? All these require a huge investment up front if you don’t take loan, and in business, these might take up a large chunk of available fund that can otherwise used for something else, or even as emergency fund if there’s market downturn.
To say it’s immoral is to say the forest is sinful.
Okay, so a forest is a living thing in itself. It’s a super organism. It grows organically, slowly expanding outwards. In the depths of the forest, trees fall occasionally, creating an opportunity for new trees to complete for the sunlight. They don’t just compete by growing, the forest also gives them nutrients through the mycelial network and chokes out threats. Natural systems form around these cycles
That’s great. I love forests
What you’re describing, is chopping down all the trees and replanting them. But that’s a farm, not a forest. It leads to weak trees with shallow roots, it leads to a weak forest prone to landslides where a natural forest would have held firm. It doesn’t have the ecosystem that would have naturally grown along with it, and would have enriched the soil and made the whole thing even more stable.
It produces a lot more wood, but it’s all weak and overextended
I think that’s a great example of what I’m referring to.
If anyone has access to these tools, everyone must use them, or someone else taking that shortcut will outgrow them and put them out of business. It’s a race to the bottom, everyone must extend themselves to their limits to compete, and so the whole system is always one bad storm away from disaster.
I’m saying that’s bad. It’s unstable and produces worse results by any metric but growth
If that essay is about the forest, then don’t bother, that’s just analogy and i simplify and leave out a lot of thing just so i can explain it.
And if you can’t bother with a real respond, why not just respond tomorrow instead? Or don’t respond. Instead you demand me to just ask again tomorrow? You aren’t my superior you know.
You (and the other guy that replied) are indeed thinking of usury (which is a very evil thing, even frowned upon by most religions), which is the situation of lending assets to for the sake of profit
Debt on the other hand is a more general concept, did you ever borrow a pen from another person? While you were writing you were in debt for that pen (but this is a silly example that can be disregarded)
Did your parents take care of you as a child? In most cultures, thar means you’re in debt and owe them care when they get old (though I understand that this varies from culture to culture, but the idea is there anyway)
If you are friendly to your neighbors and they invite you home to dinner several times, you are also expected to pay back the favor sometime down the road, this is another form of debt
To sum it up, debt is much more intrinsic to our behavior as humans than we usually think, even though “formal debt” might not be
This is not debt, and I maintain my point. Debt is wrong
If you lend out your pen and they break or lose it, a little bit of trust between you dies. And this is something inevitable over time. If you give your pen to them and they give it back once they get their own pen, trust is built. If they don’t, that’s fine too… Because you gave it to them
You can’t count favors, and you shouldn’t have debts. Debts ruin relationships, it feels bad from both sides. It feels bad to know they owe you, it feels bad to owe a debt. It feels like a relief to have it paid back, but it doesn’t feel good
You should help people, but when you give someone money to start their business you should never expect it back. You can spread ideas like honor and gratitude, but if the business fails you shouldn’t feel like you lost something
If you take care of your parents because they raised you like a child, you’re asking for elder abuse. In these cultures, the parents try to chip in however they can… In hard times historically they’d wander out into the wilderness to avoid burdening the family.
But the term for this is not debt, it’s duty. A good person is patient with their children and their parents. A good person does what they can for their family, the whole way through
Shitty people take out their anger on their children and resent their parents for every bite of food
Fair enough, I can agree on some points, and agree to disagree on others, I believe our conceptions largely align even though the labeling is different
Even if you’re able to make that work on an individual level (never buy a home, don’t get higher education, make sure you don’t need a car), you can’t make it work on a societal level.
If you want to contribute to supplying houses to people, you need to build the houses before you can sell/rent them (mostly). That means you need to take up a loan to pay for everything involved in building houses. Then you can sell/rent the houses to individuals that don’t want to take up loans. Regardless of whether you personally ever take up a loan, you likely wouldn’t have housing without someone doing it (unless you live on a family farm from waaay back), because the people that built it needed a loan to do so.
Idk about you, but while I was getting my free engineering degree in Norway I still had to pay for rent and food.
In principle, I could have studied part-time instead of full time, while working some job that doesn’t require a degree, but I don’t see how that would benefit anyone. Regardless, even if you have housing and food covered while studying, you still need money for books, paper, a computer, etc. so either you need a job (which, for a lot of degrees, means you’ll be studying part-time), or you need a loan.
I would be all for that. But at that point we’re talking about a restricted form of UBI (which would be nice), and a significant restructuring of how parts of society work.
I’m saying that the way society works now you need a loan to finance housing and food while studying. I’m also saying that’s not an inherently bad thing, as long as the loans aren’t exploitative. That loan lets you use money that you earn back once you get your degree (given that the system works as it should, which in this case it largely does where I’m from).
Well, it solves the problem of “I’m 25 years old with a decent paying job but no saved up capital, and need to buy <house/car/etc.>”. Without taking on debt, I would need to save up for years to buy this stuff, but by taking on debt I can buy it now and “save up” (i.e. pay back) over the next years.
By all means, loans should be regulated in order to prevent people from taking on debt they can’t afford, and to prevent/punish predatory practices. Debt in and of itself however can be a very good thing.
I have an apartment and a car now, with down-payments that I can afford without huge problems. Without taking a loan it probably would have taken me 25 years to be able to afford this. Except I wouldn’t have, because the money I’m now using for down-payments would instead have gone to paying rent.
In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they’re priced so it would take decades to save up.
To some degree, you’re probably right. However, no matter how you look at it, building an apartment complex or even a single house, costs much more resources than what most people have saved up at any given time. So no. It’s not just a matter of “competing” or that things are over-priced. Large infrastructure is just expensive to build, because it costs a bunch of man hours and materials to build it.
I totally agree. But no individual should be building an apartment complex, should they? Who should build it? The city, the community, the future occupants… People should get together and put their money in a pile
This should not be an investment to extract rent and profit, it should be an investment today into the future, not through debt, but to plant trees for the future
Houses are too expensive to build as an individual? Then we’re doing something wrong. Maybe we don’t run electricity to every corner. Maybe we build them out of stone, so they last forever. Maybe we make them out of wood and plaster so they can last centuries. Maybe we make them out of glorified paper, so they’re easy to build. Maybe we don’t have central air, but use passive cooling and run an AC to certain rooms. Maybe they should be smaller and easier to build
There are other ways of doing things, better ways that will mean slower progress but stability
You shouldn’t be able to leverage the future, we should always be investing into tomorrow today
There is literally no way you will build a decent modern house without thousands of man-hours, only in the construction itself. That’s before you count the hours needed for getting the materials you need.
It’s unreasonable to posit that we should design our society such that you need to save up enough money to finance something like that up-front in order to build a house. Why not go for the (current) solution, where I can loan money to finance the house, then pay that back once I have stable living conditions (because I now have a house)?
The modern mortgage is only 100 years old, and it’s caused crisis after crisis. They happen faster and faster too, with larger and larger bailouts to keep the system afloat
The debt system only works if you have infinite, ever accelerating, the rate of acceleration ever accelerating, growth. There’s no new markets to expand into, we’re running up against physics
You can’t build a modern house without thousands of man hours, making a savings approach impractical? Then don’t.
Build differently. It’s that simple. Our ancestors figured it out for 100k years, then for a century we went crazy with it, and now it’s all falling apart
You can’t tell me there’s no better way.
I love watching YouTube videos of 5 people building a house in a year just on weekends using Earth bags. A team of Amish people can build a house in days. I watch ones where one person builds a house. There’s a guy who built a castle by himself, stone by stone
The man hours are so expensive because everyone has to pay interest on the debt, and the practice of borrowing from the future means every step of the process money is being siphoned off
What kind of debt? Is it immoral to owe someone a favour? Or is it immoral for someone to owe you a favour?
Is it only immoral if there’s interest? If someone lends someone $500 to cover rent, that’s immoral? Is it more or less immoral to watch someone lose their housing when you could have helped?
Helping is great. Counting favors is bad. Help, repay help, pay it forward… All great. Expect repayment? Now we’re back at the problem
It’s funny how people keep litigating debt into more and more nebulous forms, but I’m just more and more convinced I’m correct. Debt is wrong, it’s evil. We should actively prevent it, in our thinking, in our language, in our laws
You all are just too debt brained to understand, no one should be allowed to sell their future. From every angle, it just plays out worse than just not doing it
“Debt brained”? Dude, “debt” has existed as long as humanity has existed. You’re the one who’s “debt brained” for thinking it’s a bad thing. That’s just society.
In a society people do favours for each-other and what makes it a society is that the person who had a favour done for them acknowledges that as a member of that society, they should try to pay the favour back at some point, otherwise they just seem like a drain on that society. That doesn’t mean that you can’t also have gifts, it just means that sometimes aid isn’t given as a form of gift, it’s given with an expectation that at some future point the giftee will become the gifter.
That’s just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn’t even use money, let alone debt. Taxes were paid in grain, livestock, and essentially community service
Debt created money, but money is not as old as humanity. It’s not required, it’s not coded into our genes
And counting favors is widely accepted to be shitty behavior. It’s transactional, it’s low trust
You can just do favors, and call the guy who never helps out a lazy asshole. They’re unreliable so people eventually don’t want to help them, and we have all sorts of fairy tales about it
That’s just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn’t even use money, let alone debt.
You need to read “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” by David Graeber. Debt goes back a lot longer than money, and has been part of human existence for as long as that existence has been recorded.
I said that, money was created from debt, of course debt came first
What about the Incas? I’m sure there’s others, but we know a lot about them and their economic system, and they only fell because of outside interference
Me, off in the corner believing debt is immoral
Society legitimately cannot function without debt. I agree giving people predatory “micro loans” for groceries is dystopian but every society that has discovered agriculture has also discovered the concept of debt because it’s a natural consequence of an economic order so tied to seasonal cycles. Interest is also not bad, and every society that has developed debt has also quickly developed interest. Societies that have religious prohibitions or taboos against interest find workarounds because it’s proven to be a critical part of how economics works. Personally I am glad that I was able to buy a house for hundreds of thousands of dollars I don’t have yet because I will be able to pay off that in time and I appreciate that the bank is willing to lend me that money for such a long time at a relatively low rate of return for them. The Soviet Union even had banks that offered loans with interest but they were run by the State. It’s kind of unavoidable.
Many societies also develop a system of redistribution or debt forgiveness. It’s known that too much debt accumulation in too few hands cause increasingly bigger issues or that circumstances change. But there are always those that need to learn the lesson again.
Not many societies developed a system of redistribution. We live in one of the extremely few that have, and it took a lot of smart people a lot of time (and infighting) to get into something that works.
We just need to apply it.
Why was your house worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because we use debt. How do you think people lived for thousands of years? Home mortgages weren’t a normal thing until like 100 years ago
Societies without it found workarounds, because it’s easy. It’s tempting. It’s a money dupe glitch combined with gambling. If anyone uses it, they get an insurmountable advantage over all players who don’t. It’s moloch, it’s the demon of racing to the bottom
You should not be able to spend your future
People didn’t own their houses for the most part. Have you ever taken even a freshman level economics class, by the way?
Yes. And FYI, micro and macro economics are bullshit. They’re easily digestible lies that don’t hold up to the real world. There’s real studies of economics going on at higher levels, but what gets boosted is essentially propaganda to justify political positions
Have you ever had a good history class, where instead of myths written by the winners they told the stories of people and how they interact? Where they break down the system into players, and go over the same event from many points of view? All the very human drives and politics, the infinite compromises that get grandfathered in, the true analysis of “how did we get here”?
The world is made up of systems. I build, analyze, and fix systems, it’s what I do. The only way to analyze a system or a change is to run it through, turning it over in your mind from one perspective after another, until you start to understand how it fits together
Know what every society in the past has done? Collapse. The ones with debt collapse after about 250 years, every time. It’s an inevitability… Some societies fail into the next iteration instead of going through a dark age, but they all collapse.
Debt creates a boom bust cycle that grows exponentially. It’s inherently unstable.
But some failed from external factors. From disease and colonization. There’s one empire that I find very interesting in that regard…the incas
Maybe they would’ve collapsed too, but their system seems a lot more stable to me. And I don’t think it had any idea of debt, of selling the future
Are you thinking about usury? Debt in general is actually one of the moat important threads of our societal fabric
Most important? I’ll never go into debt, just won’t spend money I don’t have. It’s a no brainer for me.
Do you own a home? Do you think that’s a worthwhile thing to do? Without debt, home ownership is basically completely out of reach for most people despite the fact that many people will earn enough money to buy a house in their lifetime. It allows you to pay for money now with money later. Debt is legitimately an extremely important part of an economy- there’s a reason it’s been invented by pretty much every agricultural society in history. As with most financial instruments, it started with farmers - it costs money to plant and grow a crop of grain, but that crop doesn’t produce money until you sell it at harvest time so you have an issue where if last year’s crop didn’t go so well due to weather and you are low on cash in the spring, you can’t afford to plant next year’s crop and get out of the hole. So borrowing money is the easiest way.
This also works with businesses and governments. Say you want to buy a machine that prints designs on T shirts because you want to sell T shirts. You can’t afford the machine now, but you believe that you’d be able to with the money you could make from your T shirt business, so you go to the bank and convince them of the plan, and they give you money up front. Without debt, that T shirt business couldn’t happen unless you got a bunch of investors to help you out.
I wonder what the housing market would look like if individuals couldn’t get mortgages, but investors couldn’t either?
Availability of credit has a huge impact on prices, and landlordism is mostly founded on cheap credit.
There are many examples of this being essentially the status quo in many places and historical eras and essentially it just makes housing availability worse since only the ultra wealthy can afford to build expensive structures and they just accumulate more wealth and power. Think about in the middle ages when a local lord would have to foot the bill to build townhouses completely up front but he and his descendants would retain ownership of them and demand payment to live in them for hundreds of years to come. There are places where access to credit is poor today where people basically live in makeshift shacks if they don’t rent because they can’t afford to buy houses otherwise. There are a lot of ways to fix land ownership and exploitation by landlords, but historically speaking, this was not it. I know nobody likes living in debt and debt can be used for exploitation, but completely abolishing credit simply will not have good outcomes as a whole.
Feudalism had a lot of good points structurally, replace the lord with public servants and I don’t see the problem. The city builds the housing, and it becomes part of the tax revenue forever. If the city prices basic housing too high, economic activity falls, tax revenue falls, and the city declines
Shanty towns aren’t good, but we haven’t fixed the problem, we just have homelessness now
Debt is bad, fuedalism is good. Got it lmao.
Feudalism didn’t make us destroy the entire world, did it?
What were doing clearly isn’t working, maybe there’s something to democratic feudalism. Seriously, it fixes a lot of issues and all I see are engineering problems
Most important, because that’s how most people start and grow their business, they don’t have multimillion inheritance.
Also buying house.
And I’m saying no one should do that, things should grow slowly and organically. It’s like trees, you can turbo charge their growth and get a board in a decade instead of a century, but the wood is incomparably worse in every way
If you let anyone do it, everyone will be forced to, despite the risk, to be competitive
So no one should do it. It’s immoral
I mean even in nature, like tree, everything is a competition. In a forest if you are a tree and can’t outgrow or even catch up with everyone then you’re fallen behind and risking being covered by everyone else, eventually you’ll become weak and susceptible to termite and disease. Your example kinda fall apart, yeah?
Same in business. It’s really about sustainable growth and able to catch up, and also secure your own stability in the market. What if your machine broke down and it’s very expensive to repair or replace? What if your current equipment can’t catching up with the demand? What if your landlord wanted to sell the shop and you wanted to secure your location instead of moving, which also cost time and money? All these require a huge investment up front if you don’t take loan, and in business, these might take up a large chunk of available fund that can otherwise used for something else, or even as emergency fund if there’s market downturn.
To say it’s immoral is to say the forest is sinful.
Okay, so a forest is a living thing in itself. It’s a super organism. It grows organically, slowly expanding outwards. In the depths of the forest, trees fall occasionally, creating an opportunity for new trees to complete for the sunlight. They don’t just compete by growing, the forest also gives them nutrients through the mycelial network and chokes out threats. Natural systems form around these cycles
That’s great. I love forests
What you’re describing, is chopping down all the trees and replanting them. But that’s a farm, not a forest. It leads to weak trees with shallow roots, it leads to a weak forest prone to landslides where a natural forest would have held firm. It doesn’t have the ecosystem that would have naturally grown along with it, and would have enriched the soil and made the whole thing even more stable.
It produces a lot more wood, but it’s all weak and overextended
I think that’s a great example of what I’m referring to.
If anyone has access to these tools, everyone must use them, or someone else taking that shortcut will outgrow them and put them out of business. It’s a race to the bottom, everyone must extend themselves to their limits to compete, and so the whole system is always one bad storm away from disaster.
I’m saying that’s bad. It’s unstable and produces worse results by any metric but growth
That’s not how forests work. At all. I don’t even know where to start on this
If you want a real response, ask me tomorrow. I can speak on this matter for days, but I’m done essay posting for tonight
If that essay is about the forest, then don’t bother, that’s just analogy and i simplify and leave out a lot of thing just so i can explain it.
And if you can’t bother with a real respond, why not just respond tomorrow instead? Or don’t respond. Instead you demand me to just ask again tomorrow? You aren’t my superior you know.
Yeah, sorry that was rude. But I do think it’s a pretty good metaphor and I wanted to follow up on it
You’re arguing with an idiot he advocates for returning to a fuedal society elsewhere in the thread.
You (and the other guy that replied) are indeed thinking of usury (which is a very evil thing, even frowned upon by most religions), which is the situation of lending assets to for the sake of profit
Debt on the other hand is a more general concept, did you ever borrow a pen from another person? While you were writing you were in debt for that pen (but this is a silly example that can be disregarded)
Did your parents take care of you as a child? In most cultures, thar means you’re in debt and owe them care when they get old (though I understand that this varies from culture to culture, but the idea is there anyway) If you are friendly to your neighbors and they invite you home to dinner several times, you are also expected to pay back the favor sometime down the road, this is another form of debt
To sum it up, debt is much more intrinsic to our behavior as humans than we usually think, even though “formal debt” might not be
This is not debt, and I maintain my point. Debt is wrong
If you lend out your pen and they break or lose it, a little bit of trust between you dies. And this is something inevitable over time. If you give your pen to them and they give it back once they get their own pen, trust is built. If they don’t, that’s fine too… Because you gave it to them
You can’t count favors, and you shouldn’t have debts. Debts ruin relationships, it feels bad from both sides. It feels bad to know they owe you, it feels bad to owe a debt. It feels like a relief to have it paid back, but it doesn’t feel good
You should help people, but when you give someone money to start their business you should never expect it back. You can spread ideas like honor and gratitude, but if the business fails you shouldn’t feel like you lost something
If you take care of your parents because they raised you like a child, you’re asking for elder abuse. In these cultures, the parents try to chip in however they can… In hard times historically they’d wander out into the wilderness to avoid burdening the family.
But the term for this is not debt, it’s duty. A good person is patient with their children and their parents. A good person does what they can for their family, the whole way through
Shitty people take out their anger on their children and resent their parents for every bite of food
Fair enough, I can agree on some points, and agree to disagree on others, I believe our conceptions largely align even though the labeling is different
It is debt, even if you fail to see that :)
You could frame it as debt, sure
I’m saying this is a bad framing and you shouldn’t frame it that way, because it’s more pro social not to think of it that way
It’s not framing. It’s a textbook example of debt.
It’s ok to say you didn’t quite knew what the word meant. No need to try to give it a new definition, just because you didn’t know. 😄
Words shape the interpretation of reality. They’re also fluid
I know what it means. There’s a difference between a moral imperative and debt in the sense I’m trying to draw boundaries around
You can actually just shape language because you feel like it. it doesn’t always catch on, but I’ve had pretty good results personally
Even if you’re able to make that work on an individual level (never buy a home, don’t get higher education, make sure you don’t need a car), you can’t make it work on a societal level.
If you want to contribute to supplying houses to people, you need to build the houses before you can sell/rent them (mostly). That means you need to take up a loan to pay for everything involved in building houses. Then you can sell/rent the houses to individuals that don’t want to take up loans. Regardless of whether you personally ever take up a loan, you likely wouldn’t have housing without someone doing it (unless you live on a family farm from waaay back), because the people that built it needed a loan to do so.
The only expense for school besides the usual stuff(paper and pencils and such) were textbooks.
Idk about you, but while I was getting my free engineering degree in Norway I still had to pay for rent and food.
In principle, I could have studied part-time instead of full time, while working some job that doesn’t require a degree, but I don’t see how that would benefit anyone. Regardless, even if you have housing and food covered while studying, you still need money for books, paper, a computer, etc. so either you need a job (which, for a lot of degrees, means you’ll be studying part-time), or you need a loan.
You don’t need a loan, you need somewhere to live and food
Maybe students just get free dorms and a meal plan by default, and we work that into the cost of education and pay for it as a society
I would be all for that. But at that point we’re talking about a restricted form of UBI (which would be nice), and a significant restructuring of how parts of society work.
I’m saying that the way society works now you need a loan to finance housing and food while studying. I’m also saying that’s not an inherently bad thing, as long as the loans aren’t exploitative. That loan lets you use money that you earn back once you get your degree (given that the system works as it should, which in this case it largely does where I’m from).
It’s not important, it’s the cornerstone of modern society. It’s a really bad cornerstone though, like great filter level bad
What problem does it solve that couldn’t be better solved in another way?
Well, it solves the problem of “I’m 25 years old with a decent paying job but no saved up capital, and need to buy <house/car/etc.>”. Without taking on debt, I would need to save up for years to buy this stuff, but by taking on debt I can buy it now and “save up” (i.e. pay back) over the next years.
By all means, loans should be regulated in order to prevent people from taking on debt they can’t afford, and to prevent/punish predatory practices. Debt in and of itself however can be a very good thing.
I have an apartment and a car now, with down-payments that I can afford without huge problems. Without taking a loan it probably would have taken me 25 years to be able to afford this. Except I wouldn’t have, because the money I’m now using for down-payments would instead have gone to paying rent.
That’s not a problem, that’s a short cut.
In exchange for you being able to buy things before you can afford them, they’re priced so it would take decades to save up.
Because if anyone sells their future, everyone has to if they want to compete
To some degree, you’re probably right. However, no matter how you look at it, building an apartment complex or even a single house, costs much more resources than what most people have saved up at any given time. So no. It’s not just a matter of “competing” or that things are over-priced. Large infrastructure is just expensive to build, because it costs a bunch of man hours and materials to build it.
I totally agree. But no individual should be building an apartment complex, should they? Who should build it? The city, the community, the future occupants… People should get together and put their money in a pile
This should not be an investment to extract rent and profit, it should be an investment today into the future, not through debt, but to plant trees for the future
Houses are too expensive to build as an individual? Then we’re doing something wrong. Maybe we don’t run electricity to every corner. Maybe we build them out of stone, so they last forever. Maybe we make them out of wood and plaster so they can last centuries. Maybe we make them out of glorified paper, so they’re easy to build. Maybe we don’t have central air, but use passive cooling and run an AC to certain rooms. Maybe they should be smaller and easier to build
There are other ways of doing things, better ways that will mean slower progress but stability
You shouldn’t be able to leverage the future, we should always be investing into tomorrow today
There is literally no way you will build a decent modern house without thousands of man-hours, only in the construction itself. That’s before you count the hours needed for getting the materials you need.
It’s unreasonable to posit that we should design our society such that you need to save up enough money to finance something like that up-front in order to build a house. Why not go for the (current) solution, where I can loan money to finance the house, then pay that back once I have stable living conditions (because I now have a house)?
Because it’s inherently unstable.
The modern mortgage is only 100 years old, and it’s caused crisis after crisis. They happen faster and faster too, with larger and larger bailouts to keep the system afloat
The debt system only works if you have infinite, ever accelerating, the rate of acceleration ever accelerating, growth. There’s no new markets to expand into, we’re running up against physics
You can’t build a modern house without thousands of man hours, making a savings approach impractical? Then don’t.
Build differently. It’s that simple. Our ancestors figured it out for 100k years, then for a century we went crazy with it, and now it’s all falling apart
You can’t tell me there’s no better way.
I love watching YouTube videos of 5 people building a house in a year just on weekends using Earth bags. A team of Amish people can build a house in days. I watch ones where one person builds a house. There’s a guy who built a castle by himself, stone by stone
The man hours are so expensive because everyone has to pay interest on the debt, and the practice of borrowing from the future means every step of the process money is being siphoned off
What kind of debt? Is it immoral to owe someone a favour? Or is it immoral for someone to owe you a favour?
Is it only immoral if there’s interest? If someone lends someone $500 to cover rent, that’s immoral? Is it more or less immoral to watch someone lose their housing when you could have helped?
All immoral. You can give someone $500, they might give you back $500, maybe even more
But you can’t have the expectations of repayment. That’s where it goes off the rails
Owing someone a favour is immoral? That’s a weird world you live in.
That’s the thing… Owing someone is the problem
Helping is great. Counting favors is bad. Help, repay help, pay it forward… All great. Expect repayment? Now we’re back at the problem
It’s funny how people keep litigating debt into more and more nebulous forms, but I’m just more and more convinced I’m correct. Debt is wrong, it’s evil. We should actively prevent it, in our thinking, in our language, in our laws
You all are just too debt brained to understand, no one should be allowed to sell their future. From every angle, it just plays out worse than just not doing it
“Debt brained”? Dude, “debt” has existed as long as humanity has existed. You’re the one who’s “debt brained” for thinking it’s a bad thing. That’s just society.
In a society people do favours for each-other and what makes it a society is that the person who had a favour done for them acknowledges that as a member of that society, they should try to pay the favour back at some point, otherwise they just seem like a drain on that society. That doesn’t mean that you can’t also have gifts, it just means that sometimes aid isn’t given as a form of gift, it’s given with an expectation that at some future point the giftee will become the gifter.
That’s just totally incorrect. Most people throughout history didn’t even use money, let alone debt. Taxes were paid in grain, livestock, and essentially community service
Debt created money, but money is not as old as humanity. It’s not required, it’s not coded into our genes
And counting favors is widely accepted to be shitty behavior. It’s transactional, it’s low trust
You can just do favors, and call the guy who never helps out a lazy asshole. They’re unreliable so people eventually don’t want to help them, and we have all sorts of fairy tales about it
You need to read “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” by David Graeber. Debt goes back a lot longer than money, and has been part of human existence for as long as that existence has been recorded.
There is no human civilization without debt.
I said that, money was created from debt, of course debt came first
What about the Incas? I’m sure there’s others, but we know a lot about them and their economic system, and they only fell because of outside interference