alt Hacker NewsSocieties used to understand this and put lots of limits around exploiting people, such as banning interest rates. But there is no unalloyed good. That ban also blocked rapid economic development as seen in the 19th century, where credit was absolutely critical for railroad construction and other infrastructure like electric or plumbing.
It's a real dilemma with tradeoffs, where slogans and soundbites don't work. Having opportunity means you may squander it. Too many guardrails on life paths and behavior blocks meritocratic social mobility as well as opportunities and motivation.
Since conditions are changing too fast there is no appropriate crystallized wisdom about it. There is no wealth of myths that would define how to live. The best we are able to say is the non-instruction to "be free" and to tap into your authentic self and author your life path with freedom and agency.
In biology one can distinguish evolved traits and behaviors (instincts) from learned ones. The latter can adapt much faster to the situation. Even better than learning from environmental feedback over one's lifetime is planning and simulating possible futures and deciding based on that. Somewhere between the individual lifetime and the genetic evolution levels, there is also the level of culture that used to reshape much slower than a single lifetime, taking lessons and condensing them over generations into templates. But more amd more as we diverge from the ancestral environmental conditions of the savannah and hunting-gathering in tight knit tribes and clans, we can less and less rely on biological instinct, cultural bedrock, wisdom from the parents' generation, what you learned a decade ago, and so on. We are forced to adapt and outmaneuver the shifting landscape faster than ever. More and more things pulling in entirely opposite directions. A vortex of stimuli to cut through with a machete-like mental strength. But most people are not built for this, and even those who are, constantly have to gamble and guess and rely on luck and hindsight.
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There’s also a second order effect of the people using easy loans/credit money leading to higher prices for everybody else. The cheap options will disappear if there’s a big chunk of the population that will go in debt to get the pricier option.
Why sell $1 tacos when customers are willing to Klarna an $8 burrito?
Why make a school with affordable tuition when students are willing to take out $100k loans?
Ban personal liability on loans (full recourse).
If the lender can only take the thing (like repossession of the car or foreclosure of the house) and can’t go after the borrower for the difference, lots of problems solve themselves.
Credit can still exist in various secured ways, business credit is barely impacted for real businesses, and people stop being able to go way below zero.
> Societies used to understand this and put lots of limits around exploiting
They still do (at least in the US). Jewish people have access to Heter Iska loans according to their religion. They do not extend this to gentiles.
Humans have known for a long time usury is inherently predatory. Nobody should profit off simply having money.
I think the problem is that we left exploitation of people under the umbrella of government open and so all the demand for exploitation has sailed under that flag.
You've got the tire companies lobbying states to up the tread depth for their safety inspections. The HVAC people got refrigerant restricted so that you have to be a license holder to buy it (artificially increasing demand for their service). The plumbing trade groups have a dozen states convinced that you need a license to install a gas dryer, etc, etc.
It's all the same "screw an extra buck out of the public" industry group and cartel behavior we had a century ago, but government just has a seat at the table and gets a cut this time around.