The APRoximate Cost of Living

Debt is inherent to the human experience. We exist within social structure, within societies, and at their most basic levels these relationships are based upon common aid and community. You might owe someone a debt of kindness, or of food, or in a more advanced civilisation money that serves as a store of value. Debt as it exists in modern neoliberal capitalism is totally different from debt in its purest, simplest form, and left unchanged will continue to destroy vast swathes of people’s lives with greater regularity. Beyond that, the ways in which debt and ownership exist within modern society are detrimental to common human existence and degrading on a spiritual level that cannot be allowed to continue in good conscience. Debt as a moral and spiritual burden has historical and religious roots across the globe and stretching back centuries, its existence as a money-making venture shifts punitive powers from the state to private corporations and citizens. This, in essence, means that society loses agency to choose how people are treated and why, with no accountability to be found. It burdens people and pins them down, unable to find stability and robs them of their humanity and certainly their happiness.

Neoliberal capitalism has centred the economy as a deity which all of society is pointed toward. It is interpreted by sage market experts, the modern theological scholars, and the brave entrepreneurial class who look God in the face and weather his storm for the promise of eternal salvation, otherwise known as ‘generational wealth.’ Church is not merely open on Sundays, it is by contrast never actually closed, there is always more grovelling and worship to be done. One could always hustle a little harder and gain just a single side hustle more. Your car can be an Uber on the weekends, your spare bedroom emptied of visiting friends and filled with a valued customer of AirBnb. But be warned. This is an Old Testament style God, one without compassion. There exists no Catholic-style confession wherein one receives forgiveness for their sins and their guilt is relieved.

Guilt in German is schuld, a word that conveniently also means debt. This isn’t a divine coincidence! They’re remarkably linked, both in sentiment and reality. Forgiveness from debt is nigh on impossible, it marks you out for scorn and denies you not only future borrowing opportunities but the necessary processes that allow one to buy a house or a car, effectively barring you from essential goods and keeping you from becoming economically enfranchised. Boom, excommunicado. It’s a feeling of shame, it’s potentially criminalised, it robs you of participation in society. Your credit score, good or bad, defines who you are and what you have been allowed to do as decided by private institutions. It’s mysterious, confusing, and can only be improved by borrowing more and promising to be a good boy from now on. This is not ostracisation by your fellow man, or even along lines decided by the public for the greater good, but rather the breach of contract with a private company and them profiting from your need to purchase beyond your means.

As neoliberalism has gotten further entrenched, there has been a greater degree of deregulation across the economy, particularly regarding corporate affairs and the greater use of financial products to generate value for the rich economically participatory class. 2008 is an excellent example of what happens when the suffering of the average relatively economically-illiterate citizen is leveraged to make non-productive cash. One can’t imagine that the GDP growth of banks issuing high risk loans, smushing them together into a poker chip, and endlessly profiting off the risk truly benefited industries and the common good of the British people. In fact, earning that endless effectively free money off gambling with collateralised mortgage payments was not enough for the financially savvy of Canary Wharf and Wall Street, they had to gamble just a little more. Throw a few iffy loans in, why not? They’re collateralised. That means the risk has been mitigated! That was until it was sufficiently built out of terrible, financially nonsensical loans that it caused the whole system to collapse, taking the homes of hard working people out from under them in the resulting flood of the dam bursting.

Government then fulfilled its neoliberally-necessitated function of supporting the economy and pure numbers growth by bailing out banks and bankers to no end while not extending that same arm to the populace, who had to endure now nearly two decades of deeply sensible austerity and cuts to their essential services to make recompense for the wealthiest bankers in the world playing craps with their family homes. Even when the religious dogma is followed to the letter by the common man, working to pay for a down payment and then making mortgage payments for decades to build a base of wealth they are still treated with contempt for taking on the risk of those loans, as opposed to the loan givers for being incompetent. As such, not only is the power truly in the hands of private institutions, but the government also exists to serve their interests, leaving the populace high and dry in the debt game that defines the modern economy. It’s immoral and utterly unsurprising that alternatives have not been offered to the system because of just how lucrative it is. The cult leaders served the Kool Aid but didn’t partake, they were quite full of Pol Roger and there just wasn’t the room.

As wealth and ownership declines in the population, evidenced by the rates of home ownership decreasing in younger generations, debt becomes a far scarier prospect. Without the financial backing of, say, owning a home worth mid six figures, people lack collateral and the raw ‘wealth’ to refinance and secure loans at a reasonable cost. Furthermore, wages have stagnated in comparison to core consumer costs such as housing, bills, and food for decades leaving us with a renting class with a total dearth of cash on hand. This has opened the door to buy now, pay later (BNPL) schemes and companies to become mainstream. These companies offer cash at cost, just so long as you pay back within the window pre-agreed upon in instalments and as such cannot make money off of a responsible consumer base who are able to make the payments regularly. They are companies which rely on economic hardship hitting their customer base and then charging large fees or huge compounding interest on their spending to the tune of $2.8 billion in 2024. Debt is so lucrative it is now the basis of an entire industry of shysters attempting to offer ‘free cash’ to those in need to pay for their basic necessities. I’m not a religious man, but there is likely a reason that the Christian faith ruled that it was a grave sin to be a usurer and that they sit in the inner seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. It’s truly the definition of predatory, the financial equivalent of vultures stripping whatever financial flesh remains on the suffering.

To stay the religious theory course for just a second longer, I look to Saint Thomas Aquinas in Aquinas Ethicus. He rallies against taking usury on the lending of money as a particularly sinful venture because it is “a case of selling what is non-existent.” He likens the idea of charging an unfairly high rate of interest to those who need the money to selling wine and charging for its drinking or charging for wheat and then for its use in producing food. It’s exploiting a power imbalance to charge twice for something, a fee being levied for the good’s explicit use, which in the case of money is being spent. Not only is this aptly describing payday loans and BNPL, but also a recent trend within modern capitalism of the enforced subscription or unlocking fee. BMW produces cars with seat heaters, steering wheel heaters, and assisted driving sensors already built in, included within the cost of production of a car the consumer has already paid for, but then charges a subscription or hefty one time payment to unlock their use. Not to use Christian doctrine as a baseline for morality, but is this not an explicit case of charging for a good’s intended use? Whoop bands are fitness wearables that offer the owner insights into exercise, recovery, sleep, all sorts of valuable data. It is non-functional without paying the monthly subscription, the band becomes a particularly ugly piece of jewellery (albeit a conspicuous consumption flex for those who want to be a massive wanker about their 5k time and sleep score, the real health-maxxers out there). Every good possible is being transformed into a subscription model to extract maximal spending from consumers and benefit corporate bottom lines. You used to own a license for Photoshop, now you pay monthly for the honour of using it. Consumers are being moved from owners to renters to benefit those who, say it with me, own the capital.

Debt is an obstacle to comfort, stability, and humanity. Social mobility hinges on special training, often in the form of a degree, to get a high paying job and climb the ladder. University fees were introduced in 1998 and in 2012 were increased for a third time to the current amount of £9,000 PA, 9x the initial cost. These loans accrue interest and are garnished from graduates' wage packets, preventing them from building wealth, interest, and stifling their economic opportunity for up to 40 years after graduation, severely impacting their potential socioeconomic mobility for their entire adult working lives. House costs rising as dramatically as they have has led to a generation spending their wages on rent instead of mortgage payments, something which prevents them from having equity or any form of economic stability either. This lack of basic stability or a back stop of any sort is inherently stressful, the idea of retirement seems fanciful to many my age at all. The stress is not just painful, but deadly, causing heart problems, tension, fatigue, sleep problems, as well as the mental side. This, simply put, makes people unhealthier and unhappier, making a society less cohesive and satisfied with life, seemingly set to work until they physically can’t anymore at which point they shall shortly die earlier than they would have without the stress with not much of anything to pass on.

We simply must turn away from the hypercapitalistic interpretation of debt and return it to something that builds connection, community, and opportunity. We need to reject becoming a renter class that is forced into eternal consumption and fees, able to own and exist without permanent costs associated. Economics and government policy should recentre the human instead of the superhuman corporation, an entity that enjoys human rights and more beyond that without the corporeal form, without the ability to care or act with compassion. Neoliberal economics has taken the government out of economic life, pushing deregulation as the status quo as a measure to inspire great growth on a chart while the material realities that surround the average person crumble. The market is no longer driven by Embedded Liberalism, a concept that drives a compromise between people and numbers. The government in the post-war period was allowed to intervene to create base levels of demand, approach near full employment through market intervention, and create generous social welfare programs to help their populace. The market was embedded because it was now part of society again, it worked to serve society while maintaining free trade. The market is now not only not embedded, it’s totally separate to the world of the living. It exists exclusively to produce greater profits and extract more out of the poor saps who don’t know the sacred texts, don’t wear the robes, aren’t leaders within the cult. No amount of hustle or grind can change the system which is unfair on a basic level. Debt is just a function of this greater machine that seeks to wring out as much money as it can from society’s fabric but it is one function that I find particularly egregious. It flies in the face of conventional and moral wisdom, it is the steroids that fuels herculean growth in the economy’s muscle but later causes its cardiac arrest. It is over-extension and greed manifest when turned into an industry and money making venture. We have to wean ourselves off because I can already feel the palpitations. People can’t take much more.