this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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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.
It's crazy. They claimed they work in finance, but the lack of financial and economic knowledge coming out of their comment is saying otherwise. It's either someone is trolling or had too much red pill that they see only black and white.
I definitely don't work in finance lol, I'm sure I've never said that in my life
I'm a programmer who's had to learn far more about accounting and debt vehicles than I've ever wanted to know
I'm just sick of people tell me I don't know about economics because they took a few economics classes in college, and then refusing to actually make any points
I took micro and macro too, I understand the propoganda. It's just bullshit. The world hasn't worked like that for a while now, if it ever actually did
You can find plenty of economists who can explain exactly how we got here though
I think they're just lying on the internet. "Debt is the ultimate evil and the cause of all of society's problems also fuedalism was good" is some serious high schooler shit. It's the perfect combination of complete lack of knowledge of the subject beyond a very surface level and an absolute conviction of their ideas that almost always comes from just being very young. Either that or they got into some bizarre fringe ideology where this is taught but I am not aware of one with this belief system. At first I thought it was some weird leftist thing since this is Lemmy after all but given the complete lack of knowledge of the writings of Marx and Lenin (who did not reject all of classical economics in favor of their ideas) I am really not sure.
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).
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
That's so peregrine lasagna
Oh my God, that's do bold. I know exactly what you mean. Clearly you've influenced the English language meaningfully
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
Yes, it is an option to revert to living in houses with earth floors, and no electricity, plumbing, or running water. My family has a cabin like that (sans the earth floor). I love staying there, and could probably build one in a year with a friend or two.
It doesn't really scale well though, so cities are out of the picture. Besides, it goes against the premise of something that works without drastically altering society. While there were large cities in earlier times (e.g. Rome around AD 0), these were largely built by slave labour. In earlier times, cities were also famous for offering terrible, cramped living conditions for common people, and disease was rife, due to inadequate waste management and clean water supply.
So yes, our ancestors "figured it out for 100k years", in the sense that they figured out how to build cramped, disease ridden cities using slave labour (alternatively near-slave workers). It's not feasible to house the modern world population on dispersed farms (the "Amish" solution), we need towns/cities.
In the end, the solutions you're pointing to would work for a far smaller global population, but not today. Even at 1700's level populations (roughly 7.5 % of the current), you would need to accept 1700's level living conditions. Whether we should drastically reduce living conditions in order to reduce the cost of housing and infrastructure is a fair debate to have, but a completely different one than the one at hand.
So there's just nothing to be done then?
Come on. Just try to think of ways things could work differently
In cities you have the city build the big buildings. The one organization with both the pile of money and incentive builds new housing. Hell, the city can just hire the workers directly, why not. Give them a budget and have them go around building and maintaining the infrastructure. You don't need investors, you don't need permits, you're already the city
I'm not saying we go back to monke, I'm saying everyone needing a mortgage to buy a house is insane and not some natural consequence
Again, I can agree that the government being solely responsible for construction of housing could be a decent idea, but then we're no longer operating under any kind of free housing market.
You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We're talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.
Further,
Honestly: Why? In a decently regulated market where exploitation is largely prevented (e.g. what we have in the Nordics) seems to work pretty well. I can acquire resources now through a loan, and use those resources to be better off in the future. Private companies can take out loans to build housing and industry, and pay them back later. This benefits everyone, because we end up having decent housing, industry that otherwise could never be built, and more companies paying taxes.
I just don't see where in this picture the idea of loans becomes a "big bad wolf" that is inherently negative.
Oh... No, this is fundamentally impossible without drastically changing the system. All our money is just made out of debt, when people stop taking loans it's deflationary. If everyone paid off their loans today, the money goes poof
As for just keeping the Nordic model? I mean, you guys are widely held to be the best system currently...But you're still just holding the wolves at bay. You're not immune to the same forces, from my understanding you had a more communal starting place, were already developed, and have fought to stay where you are, but even despite all that there's been erosion around the edges
Beyond that, at the end of the day, a system based on debt creates exponentially growing boom-bust cycles. Fractional reserve banking is just insane, it's using a powder keg as a candle
Maybe the small loans with tight regulation juice things up and don't cause too much harm... but IDK, I just think any other option would be better. Hell just print the money and give it as grants, don't gamble and borrow from an uncertain future
Now it actually seems like we agree on some stuff! I largely agree with what you're saying here, and it seems much more nuanced and less extreme than "loans bad, go back to monke", which was kind of my initial impression.
I guess we just differ on the base idea of how to finance what you could rightly call "gambles" on the future (buying equipment or property to start a business, funding an education, etc.). I think that with proper regulation, which prevents both banks and individuals from taking too much risk, and prevents exploitation, loans are a sustainable and reasonable way to do this. You seem to disagree that it's possible to regulate a debt-system to the point where it becomes sustainable, and therefore think we should try very hard to change the premise that debt is required to run our economy.
Great!
So with your example of buying equipment... So you're now saddling your business with debt. Why wouldn't you get a second loan when you pay off the first one? You take another loan to open up another location, and once that's paid off you could open up two more.
But uh oh...One of the stores was in a bad location, but you're still on the hook for the loan. Now you're dragging the good, successful businesses down for the next 30 years
But uh oh... You're too old to manage all this anymore, so you sell it to an up and comer. But they took a loan to buy it, which the business has to pay back
But uh oh... Your success exploded, and because you took all this investment you're now required to become publicly traded. Your shareholders demand you become as big as apple or die trying, and if you refuse they boot you out and put a consultant brained CEO at the helm
That's how it works in America. You have to grow at an every increasing rate if you ever take the money, and the end result is always enshitification. And it happens fast - in my lifetime we went from zero national debt to $40 trillion, we've had 3 boom-busts, homes are up like 10x, and what happens? People are financing a single meal over several pay periods and going further into debt.
On the flip side, inequality is growing exponentially. Because basically everyone, at every stage of doing anything, has to add in the cost of interest
I just don't see any upside beyond "this is the way things are done". I also don't see a path between here and a different form of money without a total economic crash, but I think that's inevitable regardless, even the world bank is coming up with alternatives
But I think the first step is we treat debt as immoral. It's what got us in this mess, even if they exist in some form we should treat the concept as shameful