{"id":95449,"date":"2016-03-10T12:13:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T17:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95449"},"modified":"2016-03-10T13:11:56","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T18:11:56","slug":"the-delinquents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/10\/the-delinquents\/","title":{"rendered":"The Delinquents"},"content":{"rendered":"

The language of debt and ethics.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration: Thomas Hosmer Shepherd<\/p><\/div>\n

When E. E. Cummings wrote \u201ci am never without it (anywhere \/ i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done \/ by only me is your doing, my darling),\u201d he was talking about a lover, but he may as well have been talking about a debt. For we are wracked with debt, especially with student debt, which last month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York\u00a0reported<\/a> to be the second largest household debt category after mortgages. It\u2019s also the debt category with the highest delinquency rate\u2014perhaps because its balances are unpayable, given the way the global economy is stacked against the young<\/a>. But still creditors wonder: How can they make their debtors pay up? The key may be in asking with the right words, and for the right reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Malaysia, World Bank researchers recently presented the findings of a study<\/a> showing that a moral prompt can be more effective in getting people to repay than simple reminders, threats, or cash inducements. Over several months last summer, researchers sent text messages to a large Islamic bank\u2019s thousands of credit-card holders. As an Islamic credit card, it\u2019s Sharia compliant, and so for ethical reasons doesn\u2019t charge interest on loans. If the bank hadn\u2019t received payment by the due date, it would allow a grace period before declaring the customer delinquent.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of this grace period, the researchers experimented by sending a range of text messages to late-paying customers. One group received a message quoting the ninth-century imam Muhammad al-Bukhari, one of the major sources of Sharia, on the ethics of debt repayment: \u201cThe Prophet (Peace and blessings be upon Him) says: \u2018non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice\u2019 (Imam al-Bukhari). Please repay your credit card balance at your earliest convenience. Call [customer-service number].\u201d Two other groups received a message that made the same claim about the ethics of debt, but with no quote from the imam, and substituting the word injustice<\/em> with a more secular alternative. Two more groups received messages that presented them with either a cash rebate on their next bill if they paid soon or the threat of being reported to the national credit-reference agency if they didn\u2019t. Finally, two groups received a placebo message: a simple reminder or a quotation from the imam with no reference to ethics or debt.<\/p>\n

The placebos had no effect at all, and all versions of the moral prompt had exactly the same effect: an 18 percent increase in repayments. The cash rebate offer only increased repayments by 7 percent. The highest repayment rate, 29 percent, came from those who received the threatening message about the credit agency, but these customers tended to make only the minimum payment necessary, while customers who responded to the moral prompts tended to pay their bill in full\u2014and with no further administrative cost to the bank.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s startling that morality turns out to be an effective tool for a financially interested party, the mechanism behind it is even more so. As the researchers explain, the different prompts emphasize various \u201cproduct attributes\u201d: using a word like injustice<\/em> \u201cbrings morality, which was previously a \u2018shrouded\u2019 attribute, to mind.\u201d The prompt didn\u2019t introduce<\/em> a moral element\u2014it simply brought to light moral aspects that were already there.<\/p>\n

This perceptual shift served the Islamic bank in the experiment well because of \u201cthe ethical dimension of [its] business model.\u201d If a less ethical lender\u2014or an outright unethical one\u2014tried to prompt a payment with such a stratagem, they would risk drawing attention to the unethical context of the debt. In fact, we can go further: What if the customer used the moral dimension anyway to prompt the business to change its<\/em> decisions and behavior? After all, just as debts aren\u2019t equal in size or risk, and we recognize this with a range of financial and legal instruments, debts are not equal in their moral features either. Couldn\u2019t we recognize these considerations, too?<\/p>\n

As instruments like derivatives\u2014those \u201cfinancial weapons of mass destruction<\/a>\u201d\u2014show, we\u2019re capable of articulating and calibrating even the most nebulous \u201cproduct attributes\u201d if we think that doing so will bring us some kind of gain. If derivatives, why not ethics? All that\u2019s holding us back, it seems, is the limits of our language being the limits of our world. Why delinquent<\/em>? Why are we wracked<\/em> with unpaid debt\u2014why not endowed?<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a footnote on the very first page of the World Bank study, the researchers observe that many languages, including German and Hebrew, share a single word for both guilt<\/em> and debt<\/em> (Schuld<\/em> in German, chayev<\/em> in Hebrew), and that Nietzsche had used this conceptual double meaning to offer, in Genealogy of Morals<\/em>, a commentary<\/a> on social norms.<\/p>\n

For Nietzsche, there can be debt without guilt because our concept of debt predates our concept of guilt. In older societies, punishment was a straightforward reprisal for an unpaid debt. There was no judgment in it, and the trade-off worked because inflicting suffering on another was an acknowledged source of pleasure: the creditor was compensated for their material loss by the joy of being allowed to be cruel, \u201cthis most ancient and most fundamental celebratory human joy.\u201d Only later was punishment<\/em> yoked to the more recent notion of free will<\/em>\u2014\u201c \u2018The criminal deserves punishment because<\/em> he could have acted otherwise,\u2019 this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement,\u201d as Nietzsche remarks\u2014and with that bound to the more modern sense of guilt. Those who are not thought to have acted freely aren\u2019t considered guilty, and are not punished. When we create an economy where some have to borrow from predatory lenders to afford a basic public good<\/a>\u00a0and human right<\/a>\u00a0like health care, are those debtors really acting freely? Which is the delinquent party?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just guilt<\/em> that we equate with debt<\/em>. The classicist and philosopher Bernard Williams drew a distinction between \u201cthin\u201d concepts, which are purely descriptive, and \u201cthick\u201d concepts, which offer the same description but colored with a value judgment. (To<\/em> kill<\/em>, for example, describes that act neutrally; to murder<\/em> or to euthanize<\/em> describes the same act with a moral evaluation.) When we say that we are wracked with debt, we seem to be conflating debt<\/em> with phenomena like pain<\/em>, doubt<\/em>, sickness<\/em>, sorrow<\/em>. And surely delinquent <\/em>is a thick concept, too: how interesting that the term for nonpayment is so loaded with implications of criminality, immaturity, and civic failure. This subtle thickness prevents us from properly assessing the transaction: we can\u2019t see it clearly because we\u2019re viewing it with the presumption of its wrongness.<\/p>\n

And this judgment is applied to all instances of debt. It seems eccentric that we use the same term for a student debt incurred in the pursuit of public good, as for a corporate debt<\/a>, incurred in the pursuit of private good. Moreover, assuming that all debt is bad suggests that all debt relief is good, a fallacy<\/a> that can leave highly indebted poor countries worse off. A neutral description of what we now commonly call debt might be something like temporary transfer. One could even choose to describe it with positive implications, as an investment. After all, the transaction itself isn\u2019t intrinsically painful to us. What wracks us, when we\u2019re wracked, is the judgment\u2014and the threats.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The World Bank researchers discovered that not everyone who responded to their moral appeal\u2014those who often paid their bills in full\u2014could afford to keep doing so. Highlighting the moral context of a loan might motivate a debtor to repay it, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s sustainable. \u201cNon-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice,\u201d the imam said. But is non-repayment an injustice if that someone is not<\/em> able to repay? Where is the delinquency then?<\/p>\n

After the burst of the real-estate bubble in 2008, moral considerations<\/a> may have induced homeowners to carry on with mortgages whose value exceeded that of the property. Banks urged underwater homeowners to avoid foreclosure so neighborhood property values wouldn\u2019t decline and the housing market wouldn\u2019t crash\u2014an extra-contractual moral burden that the creditors never shouldered, and a moral claim that didn\u2019t look at the context of the loan as a whole.<\/p>\n

But perhaps alternatives to this competitive blaming are possible. Although several languages compound guilt<\/em> and debt<\/em>, others do not. Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia, shows us one way of thinking about debt differently. One of its words for debtor<\/em> is the same as a word for creditor<\/em>: bal\u00e4-\u0259da<\/em>, the polysemy goes, owner of debts<\/em>. The concept is ambiguous between debtors and creditors because their fates are conjoined. Bal\u00e4-\u0259da<\/em>: you can\u2019t look at one without considering the other. Owner of debts<\/em>: if there\u2019s to be any judgment in the debt\u2014in the fact of the loan, in the behavior around it\u2014its locus is unclear. It might even be shared.<\/p>\n

MG Zimeta is a writer and academic philosopher, and an honorary research associate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The language of debt and ethics. When E. E. Cummings wrote \u201ci am never without it (anywhere \/ i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done \/ by only me is your doing, my darling),\u201d he was talking about a lover, but he may as well have been talking about a debt. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[21477,13181,21469,21471,21468,21464,21465,21472,21473,869,8558,17097,9288,1273,19105,21474,4425,687,1083,12856,21470,18084,21467,21466,21475,21476,2393],"class_list":["post-95449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-amharic","tag-bernard-williams","tag-borrowers","tag-corporate-debt","tag-creditors","tag-debt","tag-debtors","tag-delinquency","tag-delinquents","tag-english","tag-ethics","tag-experiments","tag-friedrich-nietzsche","tag-german","tag-guilt","tag-inducements","tag-islam","tag-language","tag-loans","tag-morality","tag-new-york-federal-reserve-bank","tag-sharia-law","tag-student-debt","tag-student-loans","tag-thick-concepts","tag-thin-concepts","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWho Are You Calling \u201cDelinquent\u201d? 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