Debt

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You owe this one a listen. In episode 94 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss everything debt, from student loans and bank bailouts to the importance of honoring one’s intellectual forebears. Did Shakespeare’s Antonio really pay Shylock with “a pound of flesh”? Why does Nietzsche say that the Christian God is a creditor of infinite debt? Who really benefits from bailouts under capitalism today? And might it be time to bring back good old “jubilees,” i.e., sanctioned acts of collective debt cancellation? As they talk through these questions, your hosts explore how debt has structured social, family, and religious bonds across history, from Vedic India, to Plato’s Athens, and how the notion of being “indebted” to one’s cultural past conditions the experience of immigrants in America today.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
Jeffery R. Di Leo, "Corporate Humanities in Higher Education"
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Geoffery Ingham, The Nature of Money
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Plato, Republic
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Shatapatha Brahmana
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
HEROES act

Support the show

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
0:14.4	The podcast where we owe it to you to apply philosophy to everyday life.
0:19.4	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:20.9	And I am David Peña Usman.
0:23.1	I heard on the radio recently that Americans' credit card debt reached an all-time high in
0:28.8	2023.
0:30.1	During the early phases of the pandemic, many people paid down their deaths, but now we're
0:35.5	back and more in debt than ever.
0:37.3	And in fact, one of every
0:38.7	two Americans who owns a credit card has debt. Credit card interest rates, what's more,
0:45.6	are upward of 20%. So Americans are spending hefty amounts of money every month in interest.
0:52.0	I am weirdly thankful to my parents who have very much an immigrant mentality about this
0:57.7	because they instilled in me a tremendous fear of going in debt.
1:02.9	So I didn't have a credit card, Ellie, until actually just a couple of years ago for the first
1:07.4	time.
1:08.5	And I've tried to live my life in a way that avoids debt. The only problem
1:12.6	with that is that, of course, the American financial system sort of requires you to go into debt
1:20.9	to build things like credit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Or to like buy a car unless you can
1:26.6	pay up front for it, et cetera. And of course, given things like our health care system, sometimes even with the best intentions to stay out of debt, people are still ending up in debt nonetheless.
1:37.3	Yeah. And I mean, in the case of my parents, their desire to get me not to go into debt came out of their own experience as immigrants who were
1:46.3	targeted by some pretty predatory lenders so for the course of their lives and you know they
1:51.5	even got stuck with with one of those subprime mortgages during the crisis which led them to
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.