It has been ages since I wrote anything here. So much has changed since 2017. I changed cities, countries, acquaintances, I left one graduate program for another, witnessed a global pandemic, and, of course, I got extremely old. I moved from Paris to Budapest. Living in Orbán’s Hungary really helped me to clarify some of my ideas about liberalism and the EU, and I will carry the strange charm of Budapest in my heart. Everything mentioned here would require so many words to be fully explored, and it is too much, for now.
For now, I would just like to announce that my paper about the relationship of household debt and welfare has been finally published. This paper started in another era. The working version of the paper, published on this website in 2014, already contained the seed of the idea. Across OECD countries indebtedness doesn’t increase because of a lack of welfare – it’s more complicated than that. In Scandinavia, inclusive welfare systems turn debt into an investment. Elsewhere, a gerontocratic welfare system creates other debt patterns encouraging widespread use of consumer credit, or no debt at all.
Only 7 years later (sigh…) you can read the peer-reviewed version of this idea on Sociological Spectrum (in open access) and a shorter version, for dissemination, on the ECPR blog, The Loop.