The single largest thing we can do is undo the changes to bankruptcy law signed in 2005, it removed bankruptcy as a tool of the poor to discharge excess debt. It's caused there to be very little downside to lending, and lead to an explosion of debt.
debtor: good lender: bad
I have empathy for the horrific stories author shares, but my logic was seeking the obvious topic that never came (in those two chapters). What if lenders decided to not lend? Wouldn't that leave those poor souls in Madagascar in even worse position?
The book is propaganda.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...
> I have read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years thoroughly and despite Graeber’s readability, scholarship, and erudition, it is a very bad book. Its tone is much too polemical. More important, when it gets to the more recent history that I know well, it is riddled with errors and distortions. Beyond that, it suffers from serious conceptual confusions, and in his excellent critique, Robert Murphy has only scratched the surface.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-da...
>> How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect:
> Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages
The above is a quote from Debt about Apple.
Here is the index of posts about errors in Chapter 11.
https://www.bradford-delong.com/.services/blog/6a00e551f0800...
It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
If people didn't have debt as a way to access these things, there might be more energy for addressing the income inequality and lack of class mobility we have, that's being obscured by the access to debt.
I see this as similar to the payday lending debate. Payday lenders aren’t creating demand, they are responding to it. What happens when we eradicate that form of lending? Most things start from good intentions.
The average price of a new car is around $30,000. What percentage of Americans can afford a $10,500 down payment and a $900 monthly payment? I’d guess less than 15% but it’s just a guess.