Oddbean new post about login | logout Every day, upon awakening, every debt, material or moral, to oneself and others, is reset. You have no more memory of it, as you do not know that it will be cancelled. Wouldn't that be an interesting way to live? Would good or evil emerge?
Less of both, I think. Debt can be used to allow a person without capital to use others capital to build what they couldn't build otherwise. So without it, less would be built, by a massive margin. There also wouldn't be any debt slavery, nor massive violations of value through monetary trickery. Overall, we'd be significantly worse off materially, but also more free. Interesting thought experiment.
Interesting point of view. By “debts” I was instead thinking of the more occasional and private ones (I lent you a book, you paid for my lunch, I take you to work every day, etc.). In any case, with this rule even in the financial world the flow of money would happen, you just don't know you have to pay it back and the lender doesn't know he has a credit (not so easy to imagine since transactions are heavily recorded). But things would be built anyway. Perhaps the lender, seeing that the other is doing interesting projects, would be spurred to do the same with his finances (and thus consequently lend less).