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In an economy which was only weakly monetised and where it would be rare to have debt tenures of more than one growing season, debt jubilees are minimally disru

In an economy which was only weakly monetised and where it would be rare to have debt tenures of more than one growing season, debt jubilees are minimally disruptive. Imagine getting a mortgage in those conditions.

freeopinion 5y ago
Immediately following a Biblical Jubilee, a 30 year mortgage is perfectly manageable. 10 years later it is still manageable. 10 more years later, and you might want to cap it at a 25-year mortgage. 10 more years later and new mortgages don't go much past 15 years. Then there's a space of 5+ years that people can only get 10-year mortgages. Then no mortgages for 10 years. Then we jubilee and everything busts open again. I think it would be very hard to predict all the side effects of such a controlled cycle. It's easy to predict some of the effects. But I wouldn't have any confidence in any model that purported to tally it all up without actually living though several cycles in real life.
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  This isn't strictly related to the biblical jubilee (wherein land ownership is reset every 50 years), but they also had debt cancelation every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). The Bible warns followers that they must not avoid lending as the seventh year approaches, calling this a sin. Well that didn't work out too well, and at some point (end of the second temple Era, about two millenia ago) the rabbinic leadership led by Hillel invented a legal loophole to work around the law without explicitly overturning it, allowing debts to persist past the sabbatical year. To read more, search the web for "prozbol" (פרוזבול). Anyway the takeaway is that good intentions aren't always enough, you have to think through the second order effects of the laws you create. The sabbatical year law was presumably invented to protect the poor, in effect it discouraged lending and helped no one.

freeopinion 5y ago

Immediately following a Biblical Jubilee, a 30 year mortgage is perfectly manageable. 10 years later it is still manageable. 10 more years later, and you might want to cap it at a 25-year mortgage. 10 more years later and new mortgages don't go much past 15 years. Then there's a space of 5+ years that people can only get 10-year mortgages. Then no mortgages for 10 years. Then we jubilee and everything busts open again. I think it would be very hard to predict all the side effects of such a controlled cycle. It's easy to predict some of the effects. But I wouldn't have any confidence in any model that purported to tally it all up without actually living though several cycles in real life.

names_are_hard 5y ago
This isn't strictly related to the biblical jubilee (wherein land ownership is reset every 50 years), but they also had debt cancelation every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). The Bible warns followers that they must not avoid lending as the seventh year approaches, calling this a sin. Well that didn't work out too well, and at some point (end of the second temple Era, about two millenia ago) the rabbinic leadership led by Hillel invented a legal loophole to work around the law without explicitly overturning it, allowing debts to persist past the sabbatical year. To read more, search the web for "prozbol" (פרוזבול). Anyway the takeaway is that good intentions aren't always enough, you have to think through the second order effects of the laws you create. The sabbatical year law was presumably invented to protect the poor, in effect it discouraged lending and helped no one.