Read more
"In this compelling and important book, Chrystin Ondersma makes the case for when abolishing debt is justified—and why. Essential reading.”—Patricia A. McCoy, Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor, Boston College Law School
“Ondersma’s visionary human rights framework—new to the field of debt studies—transcends narrowly technical solutions to the debt crisis, and instead asks what we need to change in order to bring about the world in which we want to live. A highly original and valuable work.”—Nathalie Martin, Frederick M. Hart Chair in Consumer and Clinical Law, University of New Mexico
"A passionate, deeply humane treatise on the maddening inequities of debt in the United States. Chrystin Ondersma understands that debt is not just numbers or interest rates or credit policy; debt is human beings, making unnavigable choices about healthcare, shelter, groceries, their very survival, in a system that has been built to profit from their need and from their pain. A rousing and persuasive argument that the problem of debt in America is a human rights crisis."—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
Summary
An earth-shaking reimagining of household debt that opens up a new path to financial security for all Americans.
American households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of US debt policy with her own family story, Chrystin Ondersma debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, like the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth of a free market unhindered by government interference and accessible to all.
In place of these stale narratives, Ondersma offers a compelling, flexible, and reality-based taxonomy rooted in the internationally recognized principle of human dignity. Ondersma’s new categories of debt—grounded in abolitionist principles—revolutionize how policymakers are able to think about debt, which will in turn revolutionize the American debt landscape itself.
