

A Matter of Life and Debt by Margaret Atwood - skmurphy
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22atwood.html

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skmurphy
Two key grafs:

Debt--who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid--is a
subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness,
a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.

We are social creatures who must interact for mutual benefit, and--the
negative version--who harbor grudges when we feel we’ve been treated unfairly.
Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust, without a system of
reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat--one good turn deserves another, and so
does one bad turn--no one would ever lend anything, as there would be no
expectation of being paid back. And people would lie, cheat and steal with
abandon, as there would be no punishments for such behavior.

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CalmQuiet
The reviews of Atwood's new "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" at
Amazon sound like it'll be an interesting layman's take on the systemic
problems that have left us in the current burst bubble. Unfortunately, this
brief little piece in the NY Times tells us little of it. The Washington Post
review at amazon ( [http://www.amazon.com/Payback-Shadow-Wealth-Massey-
Lectures/...](http://www.amazon.com/Payback-Shadow-Wealth-Massey-
Lectures/dp/0887848109) ) gives a much better feel of how far Atwood is able
to take this analysis of social and economic trends that set us up for such
debacles.

~~~
skmurphy
"Unfortunately, this brief little piece in the NY Times tells us little of
it."

I actually got a lot of value out of this stand-alone piece. I think it makes
some points that entrepreneurs forget too often.

