I think you’ve got a lot of the right ideas, but may find in practice that the specifics are much more culture-bound and hard-to-shift than this implies. Debt in social contexts has a lot of symbolism and meaning associated with it. Some random examples:
In high school, my friends lent each other money or covered for each other all the time, and there were one or two people who ‘owed’ the rest hundreds of dollars by the end of senior year, and no one cared or kept track.
In college my friends did the same, but less unidirectionally. One time we all went out to dinner, and as we paid, we ended up passing money around in a circle until most of the debts all canceled out.
I’ve read stories about communities where people would go out of their way to lend each other things, and keep track, specifically in order to keep everyone in debt, and therefore symbolically tied, to everyone else.
I read a story once about someone whose dad demanded repayment for the cost of raising him, and when he paid it back he cut off all contact, since settling the financial debt in essence severed a bond.
My grandpa used to get genuinely angry if any of his kids or grandkids tried to pay for anything for him, because (in his mind) that’s not the direction things were supposed to flow. He would literally sneak off at restaurants to talk to the staff and make sure the bill never made it to the table.
I don’t really have a point with all that except, don’t expect to find broad agreement about how these kinds of considerations should work.
Yeah, I agree this is more “thing to try on the margin” than “universally correct solution.” Part of why I have the whole (controversial) preamble is that I’m trying to gesture at a state of mind that, if you can get it in a group, seems pretty sweet.
I think you’ve got a lot of the right ideas, but may find in practice that the specifics are much more culture-bound and hard-to-shift than this implies. Debt in social contexts has a lot of symbolism and meaning associated with it. Some random examples:
In high school, my friends lent each other money or covered for each other all the time, and there were one or two people who ‘owed’ the rest hundreds of dollars by the end of senior year, and no one cared or kept track.
In college my friends did the same, but less unidirectionally. One time we all went out to dinner, and as we paid, we ended up passing money around in a circle until most of the debts all canceled out.
I’ve read stories about communities where people would go out of their way to lend each other things, and keep track, specifically in order to keep everyone in debt, and therefore symbolically tied, to everyone else.
I read a story once about someone whose dad demanded repayment for the cost of raising him, and when he paid it back he cut off all contact, since settling the financial debt in essence severed a bond.
My grandpa used to get genuinely angry if any of his kids or grandkids tried to pay for anything for him, because (in his mind) that’s not the direction things were supposed to flow. He would literally sneak off at restaurants to talk to the staff and make sure the bill never made it to the table.
I don’t really have a point with all that except, don’t expect to find broad agreement about how these kinds of considerations should work.
Yeah, I agree this is more “thing to try on the margin” than “universally correct solution.” Part of why I have the whole (controversial) preamble is that I’m trying to gesture at a state of mind that, if you can get it in a group, seems pretty sweet.