I once met a man from an Indian village who had spent his entire childhood and youth as a slave because a landlord had to be paid back for a blanket given on credit to the man’s father. The ‘debt’ still was not repaid when he was rescued in his middle years by a civil-society group.
This extreme example illustrates that debt is just as much about inequality as it is about lending and borrowing. Now here is another extreme. This year the share of the world’s wealth held by the one per cent of top ‘high net worth’ individuals rose to 50 per cent. Meanwhile 71 per cent of the world’s poorest people – all 3,386 million of them – could only lay claim to three per cent of total wealth.1 Gives a whole new spin to living within your means.
