Once you have enough experience, know the field inside out, and have gotten a bit of a name, you can write a book or edit a special edition of a journal in which you may set out your ideas.
If you read some older papers, you have the author interjecting with their thoughts and opinions directly in the first person, and it can make for much more compelling reading. So long as the data presented is objective and accurate, I can't say I have much problem with it. Today we use the "discussion" section for this, but it's just not the same.
Put it this way, I've fallen asleep reading more papers than I care to admit. But some of those older papers were so enjoyable and interesting to read I'd devour them and go looking for more.
Objectivity is of course important, but I think modern publishing has lost something which is also important: the excitement and interest of the authors in their own work.
The recent ones? They're horrible piles of pretentious jargon, jargon which oscillates between hyper-technical and utter-bullshit. They read like those technical marketing fluff pieces. Philosophico-technocratic verbiage all along; when you're done with it (assuming you didn't give up in despair or anger), you haven't learned anything, basically. Anyway, they usually don't bother really describing concrete things any more, they rather talk about fancy social constructs. The synergy of the Promethean dynamic of the actants of transformative innovation of mountainity. Right...
(I made up the example, but from real pieces from my last 2 attempts. I unfortunately can't remember or find the previous one, it was 10 times worse, I wouldn't even have needed to make up this example, I could just have copy-pasted its abstract.)
The difference is like between reading a page-turner, and trying to read the latest ISO standard about development methodology in safety-related domains (perfect for falling asleep before the second page).
As a PhD student, my supervisor would want to take my writing and reword it to sound "more impressive". That was basically adding in all the pretentious jargon you are referring to. I don't think it aids at all in conveying facts in a clear and simple manner. It's completely unnecessary. More often than not it is deliberately aimed to be non-committal and ambiguous so it ends up saying nothing of any substance. That's completely intentional. There seems to be a school of thought that you should never say you aren't sure or don't understand something, and so you couch that in soft language rather than being direct. I utterly despise it, and regard it as a form of intellectual dishonesty.
Later, as a scientific software developer, I tried to write and submit a technical paper for the software I was developing at the time. I spent weeks writing in detail about what it did, along with lots of figures demonstrating its performance and behaviour. But again, after my supervisor was done "revising" it, it become a lot of pretentious waffle that said almost nothing--all of the detail and simple description was reworded ambiguously or removed entirely. If you wanted to use the software, reading the paper would tell you almost nothing of importance. It seems to me that the primary purpose of papers--to be read and to inform others for their work--has not been the case for several decades now.
In the end the technical paper mentioned above was rejected, and the reason was utterly ridiculous. The software used a 5D data model inherited as part of its fundamental design from earlier software. Deliberately done for interoperability. The reviewer was from some competitor group who had a thing about the software being unusable unless it supported arbitrary numbers of dimensions. The paper was rejected as being "controversial" as a result, despite the fact that it was an evolution of something that had been in production use for over 15 years in institutions the world over, and worked perfectly as intended. That ultimately led to losing funding and being made redundant. Such is the fickle state of academia where you aren't judged in the quality of your work, but subject to arbitrary and capricious action like this. And peer-reviewed academic publishing being used as an assessment metric for promotion and funding has led to what it is today: a bizarre meta-game played by academics which has little to do with high-quality research or high-quality publications.
I'm afraid I became sorely disillusioned with the whole thing.
My research is about household debt: I try to understand why some countries have more private indebtedness than others. Growing up during the American crisis of 2008, and the subsequent global crisis, made me realize that debt can be dangerous, and I wanted to understand what pushes people to borrow money.
For a website, I wrote a short introduction to my research: https://progressive.international/blueprint/3596cc12-0128-4f... - soon the full research will be published in a peer reviewed journal. :)
One question: did you separate out consumptive credit from mortgages? The amount is so high that it seems to me that it includes mortgages.
Because in that case, is it not the cases that it is simply because norther Europe is wealthy and has more expensive houses and more home ownership.
Those mortgages are backed by houses, and are a sign of good financial practices, allowing gradual increase of wealth. Where consumptive credit is backed by nothing and is generally a sign of bad financial practices.
Even mortgages are backed primarily by future income and secondarily by the house, and this is why the bank wants to know how much money you make.
Whether or not credit card debt results in future wealth depends on what you buy.
This in opposition to a credit card debt where they have no come-back. Other than the courts and collections agencies.
I was under the impression that this was the reason that consumptive loans generally are capped far far lower than mortgages. And have triple their interest rates.
While it is true that I can put my university on my credit card, it is very expensive and very rare. I would wager that the majority of these loans are for cars. Which, I agree can create wealth, but it would have been 'better practise' to buy a cheaper car, and switch when that anticipated wealth has been created.
Moreover, those cars explain only part of the loans. The rest is 'bigger tv' or the likes. And those do not even create wealth.
Regarding investment, there are startups that got off the ground by running up credit card debt. It's not what I would do, but it's more like investment than consumption.
Or you could pay for your car to be repaired using a credit card, and if you need the car to get to work, well...
Yes, in the full paper I separated consumer credit from mortgages. In the intro I linked, indeed they are aggregated.
Long story short: in northern and continental Europe consumer credit is almost non-existent. Very tiny numbers. Notable exception: the UK. But more mortgages don't necessarily mean more home ownership eh.
"Those mortgages are backed by houses, and are a sign of good financial practices, allowing gradual increase of wealth. Where consumptive credit is backed by nothing and is generally a sign of bad financial practices."
That's almost my conclusion as well, but I put more emphasis on what social policies encourage you to do, more than on good or bad practices. In the US they really encourage going for consumer credit, also their bankruptcy legislation is more lenient and encouraging a fresh start; while in Europe we are much more draconian with debt.
I'm pretty sure OP meant "joy" as in "motivation/enjoyment of one's work", not as in "hedonistic pleasure".