Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

(1971-THE BEGINNING . . . ) 389
that rich debtors are therefore answerable to the poor. On the other,
Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money, published in 2009, can
still announce as one of his major discoveries that:
Poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the
poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions,
with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when
borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they
escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers
can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled
from the idle rich to the industrious poor.40
Such is the state of the conversation in the mainstream literature.
My purpose here has been less to engage with it directly than to show
how it has consistently encouraged us to ask the wrong questions.
Let's take this last paragraph as an illustration. What is Ferguson really
saying here Poverty is caused by a lack of credit. It's only if the
industrious poor have access to loans from stable, respectable banksrather
than to loan sharks, or, presumably, credit card companies, or
payday loan operations, which now charge loan-shark rates-that they
can rise out of poverty. So actually Ferguson is not really concerned
with "poverty" at all, just with the poverty of some people, those who
are industrious and thus do not deserve to be poor. What about the
non-industrious poor They can go to hell, presumably (quite literally,
according to many branches of Christianity). Or maybe their boats will
be lifted somewhat by the rising tide. Still, that's clearly incidental.
They're undeserving, since they're not industrious, and therefore what
happens to them is really beside the point.
For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of
debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us
all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world
simply for what can be turned into money-and then tell us that it's
only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve
access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than
money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level. ("Cancel
all student loan debt But that would be unfair to all those people who
struggled for years to pay back their student loans!" Let me assure
the reader that, as someone who struggled for years to pay back his
student loans and finally did so, this argument makes about as much
sense as saying it would be "unfair" to a mugging victim not to mug
their neighbors too.)