Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt

“Tallying what the lenders have made off Ms. McLeod over the years is revealing. In 2007, when she earned $48,000 before taxes, she was charged more than $20,000 in interest on her various loans.”

From The Debt Trap, a The New York Times “series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.”

One thought on “Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt”

  1. At Calculated Risk there’s a great analysis of the Times’ article. It includes:

    The contradiction that continues to concern me, though–which remains unresolved–is the total mismatch between the consumer’s own explanation of her behavior, which is a psychological one of the “shopping addiction” variety, and which implies that her experience has involved a lot of miserable life events that can only be relieved by compensatory spending, and the reporter’s “economic” explanation which focuses on what lenders do to Diane, and that implies that her “bad times” only threaten her continued spending rather than inspiring it. In one narrative, debt-funded consumer spending is “sustainable” until you lose your job or get sick or get divorced. In the other narrative, unsustainable debt-funded consumer spending is the response to losing your job or getting sick or getting divorced.

    I think getting a handle on this problem matters. We are continually being treated to this kind of schizoid message in the media as a whole.

Comments are closed.