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

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?

Sadly, Americans are groomed at a young age to dive deep into debt early in life. It has become normalized for most of the population to carry some form of debt (credit cards and student loans are popular choices).

Most people don't even bother making a budget — a task that only needs to be done once a month, and is easier now than ever, thanks to technology.

it never trickles down.

Try and make a budget for minimum wage. Many people can't afford to live even meagerly.

Why bother budgeting if you're just going to lose anyway?

Username checks out.

...You assume that I haven't? I originally had to learn to budget when I was making less than minimum wage, to avoid homelessness. Budgeting can be even more important with less money.

Should’ve been 96% or something—the same as the percentage of people I hope realized the number couldn’t possibly be accurate. Make it truly absurd if it won’t be accurate!

@[email protected] might consider swapping the image with an edit or adding brackets after the title or something - know you’re just resharing fuňe meme

I'm not quite at the bottom but I can see it from here.

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

noticing harder

Legit rules of the trickle

1. Trickle tomorrow
2. No trickle? See Rule 1

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.

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.

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

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)?

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