You’re at the supermarket checkout on a Tuesday night. The cashier, looking like she’s spent eight hours listening to beeps, scans your last few items: some macaroni, a can of tuna, toilet paper, and a couple of beers to get through the week. The screen reads 45 euros. You pull out your card — not the debit one, because at this point in the month your checking account is a black hole. You pull out the credit card. Or worse, you say: “Can you split that into three interest-free installments?”
The cashier doesn’t even blink, and you breathe a sigh of relief because you’ve solved dinner without looking at your real balance. You walk home feeling like you’ve hacked the system. But as you gather the bags off the belt, there’s something in the air that doesn’t smell like freedom. It smells like a leash.
You’ve normalized financing your basic survival. And this is where science, sociology, and behavioral economics join hands to slap you with a dose of reality: consumer credit isn’t a tool of emancipation — it’s the most sophisticated, invisible, and effective training leash in modern history.
The moral trap: from violence to the credit bureau
To understand this madness, we need to talk to a ghost. David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist who seemed to have X-rays instead of eyes, wrote a monumental tome in 2011 called Debt: The First 5,000 Years [1]. Graeber flips the historical narrative on its head and dismantles economics’ founding myth — the one about money emerging to overcome barter. A lie. Debt predates money. Primitive human societies ran on systems of reciprocal credit based on trust, not coins. Debt wasn’t a cold contract; it was a social bond with brutal moral and political implications.
Historically, if you couldn’t pay, the system used brute force. It took away your freedom by throwing you into debtors’ prisons, or turned you into a slave to settle the account [1]. But today, the system has outsourced the violence. They no longer break your legs; they break your credit score. And in a digitized society, a bad credit history is a living excommunication: you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t get a phone contract, you don’t exist.
Philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato nailed it in 2012 with his concept of the “indebted society” [2]. You are no longer primarily a worker or a citizen. You are a debtor. Your worth is measured by your ability to meet your financial obligations. Sociologist Jean François Bissonnette drives it home with Foucauldian precision: debt combines effects of control, discipline, and sovereignty, and constitutes a powerful technology for governing entire populations without needing a Big Brother watching you [3]. It’s enough for your mortgage to watch you instead.
The docile citizen
But how does this control you in real life, beyond giving you Sunday-night anxiety? Does it actually make you a more docile citizen? The reality is: yes. There’s overwhelming, very recent empirical evidence.
A study by Haoyang Liu, W. Ben McCartney, and their team at the Dallas Federal Reserve, published in 2025 [4], took advantage of a massive natural experiment: mortgage refinancing. When interest rates fluctuated, millions of people suddenly saw their monthly debt burden drop overnight. They didn’t get richer all at once — their net worth stayed the same. They simply gained liquidity. The consequences were striking: easing financial distress directly and significantly increased voter turnout. Seen from the other end: the suffocation of debt keeps you away from the ballot box.
In 2025, a study on the Czech Republic looked at how a 2001 deregulation of debt collection triggered a wave of over-indebtedness. Kurer and Tisch published a study in Electoral Studies [5]. Using this as a municipal-level natural experiment with a difference-in-differences methodology, they found that a 10-percentage-point increase in the rate of people with debt problems is associated with a 2.7-point drop in voter turnout. And here’s the detail that doesn’t make headlines: over-indebtedness also increases support for far-right and populist parties.
Why? The over-indebted person feels overwhelmed and disconnects from traditional politics, so they stop voting. But if they do vote, they tend to punish the system with radical options [5]. Andreas Wiedemann, in his 2024 book Indebted, published by Princeton, had already documented this pattern on a broader scale: household debt contributes to electoral support for anti-system parties across multiple Western democracies [6]. It gives people the sense that the system isn’t fair to them, that it doesn’t work. In the UK, voters in districts with higher austerity-induced debt were more likely to punish governing parties.
And when it comes to young people, Johnston and O’Brien showed in 2024 that massive student loans apply what political science calls “policy feedback”: if the state forces you into lifelong debt to study, you learn that the system isn’t a safety net but a ruthless lender, and you disengage from civic life [7].
Debt doesn’t just silence you. When it does let you speak, it radicalizes you. And in both cases, the establishment wins, because real, organized opposition gets diluted between abstention and desperate outbursts.
The strike that never gets called
Social control doesn’t end at the ballot box — it follows you to the office, the warehouse, the restaurant. If you owe three car payments, the mortgage, the master’s degree loan, and you owe Klarna for the sneakers you bought out of pure anxiety, are you going to call a strike? Are you going to demand your right to digital disconnection be respected? Wasn’t this your own decision? Or were you pushed into it?
You keep quiet, smile, and work overtime.
Sociologist Genevieve LeBaron coined the term “debt bondage as class discipline” in 2014 [8], demonstrating ethnographically that modern capital no longer needs foremen with whips. You’ve put the whip in your own wallet, voluntarily, signing with an app.
Ricardo Barradas, from the Lisbon University Institute, published a 2025 study in New Political Economy [9] analyzing panel data on strike activity across European Union countries between 1995 and 2022. Twenty-seven years of data, multiple countries, robust econometric methodology. The conclusion is blunt: worker indebtedness reduces strike activity. Indebted workers are more self-disciplined and risk-averse because they need to keep their jobs to cover their payments. And the effect is especially strong in countries with higher debt levels. Barradas suggests that credit growth is one of the main drivers behind the decline of strikes in Europe since the 1990s.
The cognitive toll of owing
There’s a counterintuitive fact that behavioral economics has proven over and over, and that almost no one applies to the macroeconomics of debt: being in debt makes you literally less intelligent.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir carried out foundational studies on the psychology of “scarcity” [10]. They ran IQ and executive function tests on people in radically different contexts, from shopping malls in New Jersey to sugarcane fields in India. When people were made to think about urgent debts, their functional IQ dropped by up to 13 points — the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep, or being mildly intoxicated.
Ong, Theseira, and Ng published a quasi-experimental study in PNAS in 2019 [11]. They took advantage of a debt-relief program in Singapore that unexpectedly wiped out part of the debts of low-income people, comparing beneficiaries before and after. Eliminating a single debt account improved cognitive functioning by a quarter of a standard deviation, reduced the likelihood of anxiety by 11%, and cut present bias — that tendency to prioritize now over the future — by 10%. To achieve the same cognitive effect as wiping out one debt account, you’d need to inject the equivalent of an entire month’s household income.
As if that weren’t enough, a 2026 systematic review covering 39 studies confirmed that debt is consistently linked to higher symptoms of anxiety, depression, and suicidality, with effects extending to partners and children [12]. The credit system steals the mental bandwidth you’d need to rebel against it. It’s a neurological checkmate. They keep you so busy putting out mental fires that you can’t see the structural blaze.
The global whip of fast fashion
Researcher Katherine Brickell traveled to Cambodia’s textile factories in 2023 to study the workers who sew the clothes you buy for a laughably low price at the big fast-fashion chains [13]. Her fieldwork is devastating. She found that multinational brands don’t just exploit poverty wages; they structurally rely on an ecosystem of rural microcredit to keep workers in a state of “debt discipline.” They can’t strike, get sick, or demand safe conditions, because the interest on their family debts — often taken out to buy medicine or pay for weddings — eats up any room to maneuver. Local lenders accept their families’ village land as collateral. Debt is the invisible foreman of the global supply chain. It turns precarity into an immovable way of life, whether in Phnom Penh or your local industrial park. Only the interest rate and the currency change; the leash is exactly the same. It is, in short, disguised slavery.
The loop
So: if credit generates labor docility and political silencing, but over-indebtedness also pushes people toward radical, anti-system voting, as Kurer and Tisch show [5] — are we looking at a system eating its own tail? Credit generates debt, debt generates distress, distress generates radical voting, and radical voting — once in power — tends to apply policies that increase debt: financial deregulation, social cuts that force you to take on more credit to cover what the state used to cover. It’s a perverse feedback loop that benefits a minority and keeps the majority in a state of perpetual anxiety.
The evidence, in any case, is stubborn, and it converges from historical anthropology, political science, and behavioral economics. Consumer credit has managed to turn precarity into an accepted way of life, and submission into the only mathematically rational option.
A third of humanity
A 2026 study by Arnaud Natal and Isabelle Guérin [14], published as an ODRIIS policy brief and a HAL working paper, has done something no one had done before: estimate the global scale of everyday debt. They used three complementary indicators — poverty, social protection coverage, and observed informal indebtedness — to arrive at a conservative figure.
The result: at least 33.3% of the world’s population (more than 2.59 billion people) regularly relies on borrowing to make ends meet.
In other words: one in every three people on the planet cannot make it to the end of the month without going into debt. We’re not talking about consumer credit here — we’re talking about survival credit.
And the study underlines that this figure is probably an underestimate. The authors are blunt about it: this debt is not a marginal phenomenon but a structural one, a product of wage stagnation, job precarity, the retreat of the welfare state, and the financialization of social reproduction. In other words: it’s not that people are irresponsible. It’s that the system is designed so that you cannot survive without owing.
So the next time you pull out your card to pay in installments for something you need to live, remember: you’re not buying time. You’re buying, with your own future money, your present obedience. And that, dear reader, is very expensive.
References
[1] David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011. [Theoretical framework]
[2] Maurizio Lazzarato. The Making of the Indebted Man. Semiotext(e), 2012. [Theoretical framework]
[3] Jean François Bissonnette. “The Political Rationalities of Indebtedness: Control, Discipline, Sovereignty.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 11 (2019): 1-18. [Theoretical framework]
[4] Haoyang Liu, W. Ben McCartney, Rodney Ramcharan, Calvin Zhang, and Xiaohan Zhang. “Household Finance Shapes Political Participation: Evidence from Mortgage Refinancing.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Working Paper, 2025. [Recent]
[5] Thomas Kurer and Dominik Tisch. “Voting under Debtor Distress.” Electoral Studies 93 (2025): 102890. [Recent]
[6] Andreas Wiedemann. Indebted: How Household Debt Is Reshaping Politics and Society. Princeton University Press, 2024. [Theoretical framework with empirical backing]
[7] Travis Johnston and Erin O’Brien. “Bad Lessons: Policy Feedback and the Democratic Costs of Student Loan Debt.” Political Research Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2024). [Recent]
[8] Genevieve LeBaron. “Reconceptualizing Debt Bondage: Debt as a Class-Based Form of Labor Discipline.” Critical Sociology 40, no. 5 (2014): 763-780. [Reliable]
[9] Ricardo Barradas. “Financialisation, Indebted Workers and Labour Discipline: Empirical Evidence on Reduced Strike Activity in the European Union Countries.” New Political Economy 30, no. 4 (2025): 1-16. [Recent]
[10] Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books, 2013. [Reliable]
[11] Qiyan Ong, Walter Theseira, and Irene Y. H. Ng. “Reducing Debt Improves Psychological Functioning and Changes Decision-Making in the Poor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 15 (2019): 7244-7249. [Reliable]
[12] Thomas Richardson, Peter Elliott, and Ronald Roberts. “A Systematic Review Examining the Relationship Between Debt and the Mental Health Outcomes of Anxiety, Depression and Suicidality.” SSM – Mental Health 7 (2026): 100450. [Recent]
[13] Katherine Brickell. “‘Worn Out’: Debt Discipline, Hunger, and the Gendered Contingencies of the COVID-19 Pandemic Amongst Cambodian Garment Workers.” Gender, Place & Culture 30, no. 4 (2023). [Reliable]
[14] Natal, A., & Guérin, I. (2026). The Global Scale of Everyday Debt. ODRIIS Policy Brief / HAL Working Papers. [Recent]