How can I push my population into debt slavery without hurting the economy?

[Erebus]

The government of Amestris is controlled by powerful organizations known as guilds. These institutions are made up of special interest groups that bring together influential people, such as merchants, business leaders, mages, etc., to provide support for common interests and goals. These guilds command wealth, power, and influence in politics and the economy, and are the true leaders of society behind the government. They use officials as patsies by manipulating greed and desire, along with a little blackmail, in order to pass legislation to suit their needs. Although the guilds compete with each other, they can occasionally put differences aside for a single purpose.

The guilds benefit from expanding market share while keeping cost of production as low as possible, and many companies pay their workers the bare minimum with low job security in order to save money. In addition, there is an issue of people dying without paying off debts incurred, hurting profits. However, this leaves them vulnerable to union strikes and social criticism which can ultimately hurt profits. Therefore, they has gotten the government to pass the 35th amendment to alleviate concerns and provide a continuous source of free labor. This amendment allows an institution to resurrect the body of an individual through necromancy for continued service to work off any debt procured in life. A mortgage, a bank or student loan, settlements or fines, and any other debts that individuals haven't yet paid off will make a person viable for resurrections. The institution can then put the person to work for them or even lease out corpses to other institutions for a fee. This would continue until the debt is fully paid. The guilds needs a way to increase the level of debt in the nation in order to provide a replenishable source for undead workers.

However, while the law has gone into effect, there are problems instituting this plan. Society is made up of lazy and spoiled individuals who wish for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter and don't value hard work. This shameful mentality has pushed many to protest the law, arguing that resurrecting their corpses for free labor to pay off debts that they incurred should not be a priority. Some have even resorted to cremation for themselves to violate the law that they are obligated to obey. Raising prices are an option, but this can cause people to stop spending and save more. Raising interest rates on borrowed money can also induce people to stop borrowing, preventing businesses from growing. These actions can hurt the economy in the long run, completely undermining the purpose of this law.

The guilds needs to begin by settling its citizens with debt to the point that the vast majority of the citizenry are viable candidates for this process. This is necessary in order to get this plan into motion. How can these organizations accomplish this?

 

[Chasejxyz]

Just look at the real world lmao there's so many options:

• You NEED a college degree/formal training to get a job, any job. The cost of education constantly goes up while the quality of the education doesn't, so the need to take out student loans is ubiqutious
• Look at the textbook industry. They're even killing the rental textbook market. How? Because they are no longer selling books to students. They are selling you access codes so you have the ability to do your homework. They're selling the books to the schools, who then rent them to you, but without the deep discounts you'd get from, say, Chegg
• Set up cities/infrastructure to NEED private vehicle ownership. Do not put any money into mass transit, do not make sidewalks, do not make bike lanes. Create laws that make the penalty for killing someone with your vehicle almost nothing and criminialize the pedestrian/cyclist. Make the price of a vehicle out of reach for most people so they're forced to take out auto loans
• Create fees that punish you for not being 100% on top of your shit 100% of the time. One day lent paying your rent? $500 fee or you're evicted. Overdrafted your bank account? $50 fee each time. Payday loans, predatory credit cards etc etc.
• Further criminialize being a victim of the "justice" system. You have to pay for court-mandated therapy/anger management, you have to pay for your house arrest monitor, you have to pay to meet with your PO. You get a public defender but you have to pay for them. Obfuscate the fee structures, make it difficult to know when you're expected to show up to court and charge them for wasting people's time. Did they know they can charge you for being in jail? Shit's crazy
• Make it impossible to get jobs, housing, or public/financial services if you're a convict/felon. It makes recidivism more appealing than "good honest work", if not the only option people have, so you can repeat the prior point ad infinitum.
• Life-sustatining goods are juuuuust expensive enough that the poorest people can just afford the bare minimum. Do you have food allergies or celiacs? Well sucks to be you, the food pantry is going to give you something, you better deal with it. The cheapest foods are full of the ingredients that make you sick, can even kill you, so you need to work extra hard to make sure your child neither goes hungry or dies from anaphylaxis (EpiPens are $600 and that's BEFORE the cost of the trip to the ER. You have to go to the ER or the EpiPen will kill you). The cheap foods are calorie dense but vitamin deficient, so you need to eat a lot to get the nutrition your body needs. You're more likely to work physically demanding jobs, you need more than office workers. But now you're obese, doctors won't believe there's anything wrong with you besides being fat. Your insulin costs $1,000.

I don't know if you've ever "been poor," but there is so, so much of this shit that already exists and causes people to suffer every day. Legally, your debts are forfeit upon your death (save for a spouse), but most people don't know this, so debt collectors harass the parents, siblings, children and grandchildren of the deceased and lie and threaten to get them to pay up. I can go on and on about this. There is plenty of things you can draw inspiration from from reality.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

So, basically, keep your world just like contemporary America and add the premise of resurrection into debt slavery. That takes care of it.

But if you say, or imply, that the debtors are just plain lazy, don't value hard work, and want everything handed to them on a silver platter, you're ignoring the reality. People get into debt because it's impossible to avoid, not because they're lazy. Asking for their fair share is not asking for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. So, whose side are you writing from? The way you've framed it, it sounds like your guilds who keep everyone in debt slavery are supposed to be the good guys.

If that's really the message you want to convey, feel free, but it would make for a very icky story.

 

[WooHooMan]

If you don’t mind me asking: what exactly is the plot of this story?
Because I’m a little worried that whatever plot you might have might get washed-out in all the economics, you know. If your plot can sustain it, I’d recommend just making a flat-out mafia state where the guilds are overtly manipulating the economy for their own gain and everyone is powerless to stop them as there are no institutions capable of or willing to fight back.

Granted, that method isn’t exactly “realistic” but it’s an easy set-up to convey, it quickly and neatly explains the circumstances and it can make for a good backdrop to a story without drowning out the plot in worldbuilding minutiae.

 

[Stevie]

Not realistic? I'd say it is horribly realistic of exactly where most of the West is now, if you swap out the guilds/mafia for the top 1% of the rich. As Rosemary Tea says above, the model of America fits the bill exactly.

Adding in generational debt is a good idea, I think a form of this already happens in some countries (Japan comes to mind), where you can pass on your mortgage to your kids. Also, people in your world being forced to buy more debt to get by, would add ot the misery. We hide our blushes in this world over this by dressing it in fine clothes and calling it 'credit'.

Not my area of expertise but I do recall that in times past, being a borrower or a lender was considered a deep sin by Christianity. It was known as usury. A few centuries back though, a bunch of rich guys went, "Hang on a minute, there's money to be made here. We need to have a word with the church about this." And lo, the modern economy was born.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Out of curiosity, how sentient are these resurrected individuals? It sounds like they are just mindless zombies who do what you tell them, minus the eat your brain apocalypse.

If that is the case, then there is one major thing you are overlooking. It will be very tempting for a lot of people to use these future gains to fund their present day lifestyle. Look at it this way, you could go into a bank, borrow a few million dollars and you would never have to pay it back. Once you die, your body gets resurrected and without you knowing of it or noticing anything about it, it will work of that debt. My feeling is that it will be something a lot of people will want to do. The only reason not to would be because of religious beliefs. If you believe that when you die you go to a better place and that being resurrected interferes with that, then you wouldn't want to actually do so.

It's similar to a government borrowing money. No one actually notices that the money is borrowed. Some undefined future generation needs to pay it back, but that's a long way away, and surely that future generation will figure out some way to postpone having to actually do so.

This actually leads to 2 things:
1: there will be no more uneducated level jobs for living people. Given enough zombies to do all the jobs they can do for basically free, there will be no jobs left for living people (except where actual interaction with people matters).
2: hyper-inflation. Imagine a world where suddenly everyone is given $10 million. What happens? People start spending like crazy. Everyone will want a bigger house, sports-car, large screen tv or whatever. There's still only a limited supply of them, which means prices will spiral out of control. Think Germany in the 30's but worse.

Of course, if that's not the direction you want to head in, make it a more gradual approach. It starts with a few individuals who during their life grant the corporations the right to do this to them, because of crippling debt they can't get rid of. This leads to cheap labour decreasing the number of low paying jobs available, which increases unemployment, which increases the number of individuals who sign up for this etc. At some point, this gives the guild enough power to turn the situation around to where this is the default action for people who die with remaining debt.

 

[LCatala]

It's hard to have both slavery and a dynamic economy. Slavery discourages technological innovation, mechanization, widespread education, investments in anything than the specific good and services produced by the slaves, it makes the economy centered around producing and exporting just a handful of good types, and so extremely vulnerable to change.

There's a reason why the nations that didn't willingly abolish slavery were all conquered by the nations that did (and it's not because God and Moral were on the side of the latter).

 

[Prince of Spires]

There's a reason why the nations that didn't willingly abolish slavery were all conquered by the nations that did (and it's not because God and Moral were on the side of the latter).

I think this is a big oversimplification. The arguably longest-lived empire in history, the Romans, employed slaves on a massive scale, and they became very succesful (as an empire). Same for the British and the Spanish. Most people consider the ancient greeks very innovative. Much of their philosophy, culture, architecture and science is celebrated even today, and yet 30% of the population of Athens were slaves.

Much as I dislike slavery, I think that there is little correlation between the succes of a nation and slavery.

 

[LCatala]

Eh, the technical achievements of the Romans and Ancient Greeks are massively overrated (something we got from the Renaissance and their fanboy attitude for everything classical). Greek "science" was mostly abstract, ungrounded philosphy, that explicitely rejected observation of the natural world as pointless and illusory (this is what the allegory of the cave is really about), and Roman science, for the most part, was just commentaries on Greek science. Outside of architecture, the iron age is mostly a period of technological stagnation. Far more innovation happened during the european middle ages.

The Spanish Empire was a structural disaster that only held up because the New World territories happened to be full of gold that could be continuously injected into the Empire to prop up an outdated and ultra-rigid caste system. But once the gold ran out, it just took one Napoleon for the entire empire to collapse into an endless series of civil wars, border conflicts and military dictatorships, with multiple structural problems tied to slave economy continuing to this day in almost all of Latin America (Spain itself has managed to reform under the influence of its European neighbors, but this is a recent phenomena — Spain was basically still a feodal country in the 1950s).

As for the British Empire, they built their wealth and strength before the slave trade, and it never became a central part of the Empire — but pretty much all the former British colonies were slavery was practiced are now far worse off economically than those where it wasn't. This even extends to the US: to this day the southern US are poorer (including the white population) than the northern states.


The main trap of slavery, and of cheap workforces in general (but slavery pushes the effect to its peak), is that it prevents mechanisation/ Mechanisation frees up arms for less essential and more complex tasks, leading to more people getting educated, to urbanization, to diversification of the economy, and other factors that make a country more economically wealthy, more politically stable, and more able to project military might.

 

[pmmg]

Offer lines of credit with introductory low interest rates.

 

[skip.knox]

>Society is made up of lazy and spoiled individuals who wish for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter and don't value hard work.
I stumbled over this. An entire society made up of lazy people? I wouldn't buy that for a moment. It's not realistic, it's a caricature.

I'd be interested to hear from the OP regarding the several responses already posted. Folks like to know, when they offer a response, that they've at least been heard.

 

[WooHooMan]

>Society is made up of lazy and spoiled individuals who wish for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter and don't value hard work.
I stumbled over this. An entire society made up of lazy people? I wouldn't buy that for a moment. It's not realistic, it's a caricature.

To be fair: a lot of dystopia stuff tends towards the caricature. And I interpreted the setting as a dystopia thing where the exploitative and opportunistic patricians oppress the lazy and entitled plebeians. Like, a vicious cycle kind of thing. And then maybe the protagonist is the one noble person who breaks or breaks free of the system. Y’know, standard dystopia kind of stuff.
Of course, I wouldn’t know unless Erebus tells us the plot.

Actually, if the protagonist is themselves a zombie, that’s basically the set-up of the film White Zombie - a rich guy turns his debtors into zombie slaves because they relied on him to give them all they wanted.

 

[Queshire]

I just chalked it up as an exaggeration for effect. (Hopefully.)

 

[Erebus]

I am a corporate executive who doesn't like millennials or gen z'ers because they complain too much about equal pay, workers rights, and other such nonsense that interferes with my GDP growth.

>Society is made up of lazy and spoiled individuals who wish for everything to be handed to them on a silver platter and don't value hard work.
I stumbled over this. An entire society made up of lazy people? I wouldn't buy that for a moment. It's not realistic, it's a caricature.

I'd be interested to hear from the OP regarding the several responses already posted. Folks like to know, when they offer a response, that they've at least been heard.

 

[Queshire]

Ah, gotta love these Erebus threads.

 

[Miles Lacey]

The easiest way to introduce debt slavery without harming the economy? Give them mortgages. New Zealand has one of the highest levels of debt per capita and it's all because of our fondness for getting mortgages from Australian-owned banks to buy grossly over-priced housing. (The average home costs $NZD 820,000 or $USD 568711.04.)

 

[TheKillerBs]

Eh, the technical achievements of the Romans and Ancient Greeks are massively overrated (something we got from the Renaissance and their fanboy attitude for everything classical). Greek "science" was mostly abstract, ungrounded philosphy, that explicitely rejected observation of the natural world as pointless and illusory (this is what the allegory of the cave is really about), and Roman science, for the most part, was just commentaries on Greek science. Outside of architecture, the iron age is mostly a period of technological stagnation. Far more innovation happened during the european middle ages.

Greek thinking included a lot more than just Plato. Off the top of my head, the Greeks gave us the Pythagorean theorem, the Archimedes principle, Archimedes' law of the lever, the discovery that the square root of two is irrational (and thereby discovering that irrational numbers exist), and proving that the Earth is round (and in actual fact calculating its circumference to an absurd degree of accuracy).

 

[Mad Swede]

OK, your economic system doesn't work as you've described it, partly because those being paid so little won't be able to buy the products being sold. The other issue is that if you can free labour in the form of resurrected people then you won't need to pay your workers. So how do the consumers get the money to pay to buy your products? Unless the guilds are exporting their products to somewhere else the system will collapse.

 

[skip.knox]

Yep, it also doesn't make much sense. How many of us are in debt to our own employer? Most of our debt is owed to financial institutions. I picture whole office buildings full of zombie accountants and tax lawyers. Also, I was a history professor. I can just picture working for my state university (and no wise cracks about certain professors!).

I can't figure the logic. Society is already so demented as to use necromancy to create slaves. In such a society, there need be no pretext about saddling citizens with debt. Just raise the dead and enslave them: no excuses needed. Presumably everyone's cool with that (since amendments require pretty wide popular support).

 

[pmmg]

I can't figure the logic. Society is already so demented as to use necromancy to create slaves. In such a society, there need be no pretext about saddling citizens with debt. Just raise the dead and enslave them: no excuses needed. Presumably everyone's cool with that (since amendments require pretty wide popular support).

All of that assumes that any of it is requited to make sense, but societies and organizations are full of things that spring up for reasons no one can remember, and barely make any sense if they can. I am dubious such an economy could spring up as well, but you...fantasy. A dystopian setting of bringing back the dead to pay their debts is hardly the biggest lead we have ever taken.