my understanding is that this doesn't work out in practice, much the same way Christian teachings are ignored or "loopholes" are found. but boy is that the exact right attitude, on paper, to have towards money.
my understanding is that this doesn't work out in practice, much the same way Christian teachings are ignored or "loopholes" are found. but boy is that the exact right attitude, on paper, to have towards money.
this combined with forgiving all debt every 7 years sounds like a neat way to organize society...
i mean, no one would lend you money
Graeber showed in both Debt the first 5000 years and The Dawn of Everything that people did in fact lend money even when such or similar rules existed.
i wouldn't argue that societies are, trans-historically and a priori, unable to support such policies. but i think it's pretty evident that the whole web and structure of social relationships would need to be fundamentally different for that to be the case.
I mean Debt 5000 years and Dawn of Everything both are online, while there is some critique they give good counter balance to common ideas about money and credit. I do think there is value in thinking how a society in which that is the case could be (and in fact we do have societies in which jubilees happen, when people die) but Debt 5000 is a good foundational text.
They would, it would just be grounded in kinship. How often have you lended a friend money not actually super concerned with whether or not you get paid back? Or, for a more socialist alternative, a lending cooperative could view no-interest loans as a social good and see defaults as the price of a healthy society.
i'd love public banking and i'd love a society where intimacy and trust were cardinal, but i'm not sure that those are identical with, or produced by, at the margin, frequent jubilees.
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sure, but individual discharging of debt through bankruptcy (which could be, like, hedged against) probably isn't the same thing as regularly reoccurring jubilees for all borrowers.