Cory Doctorow

speaker

1,125 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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What Now? with Trevor Noah · Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And so if you wanted to plant a crop, you would have the money for the crop after it came in, but you needed the money for the fertilizer and the farm labor and everything before it came in.

And so there was a credit market in ancient Babylon, and they would record how much you owed, and then you would pay it back out of the harvest.

And the thing is that no matter how good a farmer you are, sometimes the crop will fail, right?

There'll be a locust, there'll be whatever.

And so run that long enough.

And eventually you end up with a group of hereditary creditors and a group of hereditary debtors.

Because if you can't pay the debt, then you've got to roll the debt.

And then you owe, then you will never get ahead, right?

You have, by the time you've like lost two or three crops in your career, you're just perpetually behind.

And then if that happens long enough,

the agricultural output of the country, which is the most important output it has, becomes the plaything of the creditors who are like, actually, I want more ornamental flowers for my table, not more staple crops.

And then the society fails.

And so Babylon's answer to this is something that persisted all through the Bronze Age called the Jubilee, which was that at fixed intervals, so every 50 years, plus when certain occurrences happened like a change of the king, all debts were forgiven.

And this persisted through- Yo, what?

Yeah, and this persisted through Rome.

It persisted through all the civilizations of antiquity.

They knew, they foresaw this, yeah.

Yeah, because they had this problem over and over again that when you have a group of creditors, they start to command the productive output of debtors.

And these are self-reinforcing phenomena where the creditors get richer and the debtors get poorer and more beholden.

And creditors are not good planners, right?

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