Q: Your new book is called Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Of all the things you could be writing about—at this point in your career, the whole world’s open to you—you chose to write about money.
A: No, I chose to write about debt. It’s a different thing. Debt is not just a money thing. It’s about owing and being owed. Money is just one thing you can exchange. You can exchange good deeds, you can exchange revenge, you can exchange murders. I said to some guy today, “Okay, the simplest form of it is you open the door for somebody and they don’t say thank you. How do you feel?” He said, “That happened to me this morning. I was mad.” I said, “Right, because you knew you had not been repaid. You had done something for that person and they had not reciprocated with the social stroke that should have been coming to you.”
Q: Clearly, these are primitive feelings. You write at length in the book about how our fellow primates respond to experiments testing their sense of fairness and indebtedness.
A: Is it fair that one monkey gets a grape for handing over the very same pebble for which another monkey only gets a cucumber? And obviously it’s not fair because the monkey with the cucumber gets mad. And with a troop of chimpanzees it’s favour-trading. You know, I help you against her and then I ask for your help in return and if you don’t give it, I get very angry, because the scale is out of balance. You owe me and you’re not paying. You blew me off!
Q: Monkeys only co-operate with other monkeys who are playing fair?
A: Yes. But in the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.
Q: This is more or less universal.
A: It’s universal.
Q: And generally cheaters don’t prosper.
A: Well, they often do.
Q: But you also argue what goes around comes around, that the concept of payback is a real and pervasive one.
A: Yes. We like to believe that, and that’s what these afterlifes do such a good job of, you know? Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they’ve gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they’re going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It’s almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you’ve gotten away with it, but you’ll pay for it later.
Q: You seem concerned about whether we as a society are as aware as we should be of our indebtedness.
A: We’re aware of it right now, oh boy! You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
Q: Suddenly debt’s not stigmatized anymore, or it’s readily available.
A: And suddenly it’s a problem. Under the old system—which is now so archaic that a lot of people can’t remember it—if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldn’t take out money that you didn’t have. But with the credit card you can spend money you don’t have, and that is just so tempting. You think you have the amount of money that is your credit limit. We’re just wired to think that, you know? Until the bill arrives—a sobering moment—you think you’re richer than you are. So it just encouraged people to live that way, always over the edge, always paying back.
Q: You talk about students in debt.
A: A lot. It’s very hard for them not to be unless they’ve got big scholarships or rich parents. And it’s called investing in your future, but like any investment it’s risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you don’t invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So it’s a real dilemma.
Q: Discussions of debt often lead to discussions of usury and interest, and many sources you cite are against the practice.
A: Yeah, that’s a very interesting subject. Do you know this book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift? It’s got a whole chapter on usury in it and how people got around that prohibition. There’s a ton of stuff in the Bible concerning debt, debt law. There’s a very funny thing that I didn’t put in the book. In Deuteronomy there’s a whole section on fairness, like, you shouldn’t have two sets of scales in your house, meaning you shouldn’t double-weigh, you know, one for you, one for them, you shouldn’t do two sets of books, in effect. And in the middle of this rather dry stuff it says if two men are having a fight and the wife of one of them rushes into the fight and twists the genitalia of her husband’s enemy, her hand shall be cut off. And I thought, “What’s this doing in here?” And then I thought, “Okay, it’s about fairness, you know, it shall be a fair fight, there shall not be an extra genital-twisting element suddenly.”
