Conclusion

Abstract

This book set out to examine the cultural dynamics of personal finance. Unlike psychological or economic approaches, a cultural perspective highlights how meaning, customs, morality, collective sentiments, and institutions mediate individual financial fantasies and practices. Debt is hardly new to Britain. People have long lived out of one another’s pockets (Finn, 2003; Muldrew, 1998). The impulse to enter into and payback debt contracts is as deeply rooted and morally charged as the enduring outrage that has followed those who charge undue interest or deceive the vulnerable (Atwood, 2008). Yet, the conditions of personal finance have profoundly changed. In the twentieth century, financial institutions turned their ear from the old religious condemnation of debt towards a secular emphasis on investment and economic growth. Debtors no longer wallowed in prisons. Instead, a psychiatric profession attempted to help them reclaim their willpower and take control of their spending. A modern emphasis on democracy, financial freedoms, and rights replaced traditional class ground and exclusionary credit systems. Many celebrated these changes, with good reason: banks became responsive to consumer interests; wealth expanded, much of it generated by the financial sector; women achieved more financial equality; a greater percentage of the population bought homes than at any other time.