Debt Subcultures

Whenever the phrase “debt culture” is used I raise an eyebrow. The connotations are rather paternalistic, and so are the arguments. There’s the “Brown is setting a bad example by borrowing so much” (and now, it seems, we’re getting his comeuppance), which deflects our own borrowing guilt, trnasferring the blame to him. And there’s the recongition that debt has become economically necessary for everyone under the age of about 30 who isn’t financed by parental blank cheques, and far too many people above 30, followed by the “And because it’s part of the culture, people get used to it” (subtext: debt culture make us reckless with money). Which seems like taking things from the wrong perspective, as if by some mysitcal force or desensitisation we get ‘hooked’ on debt.

To me, it seems much simpler: for most people, taking out a loan is something that doesn’t merely make it easier to buy things, it is a necessity which has already happened and which then makes it harder to work out what we can afford. There was, as they say, a time when if you saw something you couldn’t afford, you didn’t buy it. Now, it’s not so much that you go in and take out a loan and get it, it’s that you’ve already got so many loans and you might not even know how much is in your bank account in any given day of the month, and even if you have enough cash now, there’s no way of knowing that you will need to save the money up to pay off your debts because next year you’ll be getting a real-terms pay cut while your loan grows even larger and you should have thought of that before you bought it/took out that loan/got that job/started breathing, shouldn’t you?

My response is to be a miser, and gnash my teeth every time Sainsbury’s basics go up by 2p. But in a way, I quite understand the people who realise that they don’t have that peculiar survival skill of the modern age known as “being able to calculate compound interest while picking the most relevant rate of inflation from a choice of three and adjusting it for local factors and personal consumption habits”. People who say “to hell with it”, buy a plasma TV and wait for the demands to come to them. People who work themselves into the ground to afford things they can’t take the time to enjoy. People who start smoking because the borrowing guilt and self-enforced financial anxiety is too much. Or anything in between, really.

For the architects of our economic world, this shouldn’t be a problem because the ideology of ‘choice’, not to mention the economic model these prodessionals use assumes we’re all perfectly capable of performing such feats for every potential purchase, every possible life decision, from mortgages to families to groceries to jobs to recreation. But of course it is, and it’s a big one. The only people who can really take advantage of our supposed freedoms are the ones who can afford accountants and stockrokers and so forth, the people who don’t need to go into debt or who can pay off more debt in a year than we can earn in a lifetime. For the rest of us, our predicament is deepening: wage slavery is developing into debt slavery. And when interest grows quicker than your ability to pay it back, that’s a very long period of indenture.