It's my pleasure to present another guest post from The Mound of Sound. I miss his blog because he often wrote of things I hadn't thought of. Global debt is one of those things:
You think you've got problems. The US debt clock just passed $40 trillion. That's a per capita debt of $114,285. Every man, woman and child and the clock is ticking.
But let's not stop there. The global debt stands at $350 trillion. Per capita that's a more manageable $43,750 although a fair percentage of those people are impoverished. Taken collectively the total debt represents 305% of global gross domestic product.
We're embarking on a very difficult time from the ravages of climate breakdown to water shortages, food insecurity, on and on and on.
What if we agreed that this is no time to be carrying 305% of GDP in debt. This is where we need to become a little creative.
I invoke the ghostly spirit of Solon. Sol who? Solon was an Athenian lawmaker. In 594 BCE, Athens had a nightmarish debt crisis. The lower orders were defaulting on their debts. Debtors and their families were being slung into prisons, some sold into slavery. Their creditors, the merchants, were in their own predicament. Too many of their traditional customers were in jail. You can't sell stuff to a guy in jail.
Solon's solution was a purge to cancel debt. "Seisachtheia (meaning "shaking off of burdens"), a revolutionary debt relief reform that canceled all debts, banned loans secured by personal freedom, and freed citizens enslaved due to debt."
I realize I'm digging pretty deep into the past on this yet this crippling measure of debt with the challenges that we cannot avoid could make paupers of all of us if we don't see the unmanageable debt as the threat.
Humanity is coming in for a crash landing. Now we must decide if it will be survivable
It seems like the Mound is breaking out of his self-imposed retirement? Welcome back to the fray.
ReplyDeleteThe size of the 'Debt' is bound be part of the breakdown of international order when debt-defaults add to this (partial|) list of trust-breaking:
* As when one country kidnaps the president of another country.
* As when gold reserves left for safe-keeping in the UK are stolen from the owners.
* As when countries start illegal wars and others are given a pass on genocide.
There is clearly a litany of abuses committed by the U.S., Anon. That gold is being transferred out is an indictment of its standing in the world, and the massive distrust they have engendered. I doubt they can recover any goodwill in the short or medium-term, even when their master is gone.
DeleteI miss the Mound. Time for him to refill his inkpot, sharpen his quill, and rejoin the community.
ReplyDeleteHear, hear, Bill! Let's hope he heeds your advice.
ReplyDeleteSolon's debt forgiveness solution was revolutionary for the Greek world but something that it appears was, more or less, standard operating procedure in the ancient Mesopotamian cultures.
ReplyDeleteCertainly it shows up in Babylon and earlier in Assyria. One can even find reference to it in the bible in Leviticus 25 ; presumably it is something the Israelites picked up in Babylon.
Michael Hudson's and forgive them their debts covers much of this history. Hudson writes that the Babylonians strictly distinguished between personal debt (student loan?) and commercial debt. Personal debt could be forgiven, you were stuck with commercial debt.
If I understand Hudson's argument personal debt enriched the wealthy and threatened the state.
Thanks for the additional information. I assume this is The Mound?
DeleteNo, John from Kingston.
DeleteBTW, totally OT question.
Do English teachers in Ontario teach the “five-paragraph essay”? I run into references to it occasionally on US blogs. We were just moving from cuneiform on clay to ink on papyrus when I took my last literature or writing course.
Hi John. While It has been 20 years since I retired, at our school we certainly taught the five-paragraph essay. I don't recall if it was prescribed by the curriculum, but it was something our English department always stressed, with fairly good results. It taught structure, and forced students to think carefully about what they were writing. I have no idea about what is going on in the contemporary classroom, however.
DeleteI suppose I should explain why this focus on debt. I've followed this climate catastrophe for almost 30 years. At first I was a skeptic but the passage of time erased my doubts.
ReplyDeleteOver the past 15 years I have had sporadic contact with a few climate scientists from the UK, the US, Germany and one fellow from Japan. During this time probability became certainty although many of us still resist it.
Two years ago I sought treatment from a psychiatrist. I had five close friends, one in Europe, another in the States and three in Canada. The sort of friends you might not speak with for a year or two yet it was always as though you had spoken only yesterday. You could divulge anything without judgment or rebuke.
With my litany of health problems I was sure I'd be the first to go. Didn't turn out that way. Leukemia, brain cancer, bowel cancer, heart disease and then my very best friend was felled by "post surgical complications." Here I am the sole survivor.
The worst part was the indecently short interval between their deaths. It interrupted the grief process and, trust me, it can become dangerously cumulative. I needed help and I got it. The depression never really goes away but it becomes bearable.
Eventually the conversation turned to climate breakdown. I worried that this had inflicted a depression that could not be managed, much less cured by psychiatric therapies.
My doctor this was not a mental illness but an entirely normal response to an existential threat. That may explain why so many of us prefer to turn our backs to it
He said how I was feeling was or soon would become the new normal as the ravages of climate breakdown triggered creeping normality.
What to do, what to do? Flee or fight. At my age there's not a lot of fight left in me. Yet fleeing is no option.
The prescription is to stay engaged, write, talk, read, identify things that need saying. A lot of it comes down to simply connecting dots.
The story made the rounds about the US debt passing the $40 tillion mark. But what about the small, poor countries?
The per capita debt load of the third world is a fraction of America's but it is a vastly greater burden than it is for the G20 nations.
They are the miners' canary of climate breakdown. Their countries are becoming seasonally uninhabitable. Their ability to service debt is floundering.
Imagine the desperation of a guy packing up his family, abandoning lands that have sustained his ancestors for centuries, scraping together whatever he can to get his family on an overloaded boat to cross the sea, if they make it.
Were they instrumental to the greenhouse gas disaster? No, that was our doing. We bear much of the responsibility for their plight. Even if we committed tomorrow to slash GHG emissions, for them no good will come of it.
It struck me that relieving them or their nations of debts that they will never be able to repay is a start. If we don't lift that burden, we will be on them like a flock of buzzards on a dying horse.
If we cannot exercise a degree of altruism in our dealings with these desperate people, when will it be our turn?
Thanks for the explanation. My condolences on the loss of your friends. I have lost a few over the years, but none of them were close. I sometimes think about how I will feel if the friends I am close to suddenly start dying. It will be wrenching, I am sure.
DeleteBecause the idea of debt forgiveness is an ancient one, it got me thinking about The Jubilee Year. I think they were on to something. :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_in_the_Catholic_Church