Having a foot in both the Indian and American worlds recently has given me what I think is a rather distinct perspective on the progression of western economies. It is beyond debate that over the past few decades the western world has progressively become more capitalistic, and in so doing the overall wealth of citizens has increased. But in this experiment we call western democracy we have, over the last 5 years in particular, started to see the cracks in the economic and social philosophy that the western world has adopted. These cracks are no more clear that when examining our western economies against the backdrop of India, a rapidly progressing democracy currently in a sort of limbo between the eastern and western worlds.

I speak specifically of the explosion in recent years of consumer lending in India. Not 10 years ago it was virtually unheard of for an Indian to hold a credit card, or moreover to make a major purchase such as a home on credit. Today, roughly 10-20% of Indians regularly use credit cards, and millions more join those every year. The opportunity to obtain reliable credit has, no doubt, improved the lives of millions of Indians, just as it has westerners, by giving them the opportunity to buy a home, a car, or other necessary purchase that they might otherwise have never obtained. At the same time, however, it is very clear that India is but 10 years behind, and closing quickly, in its manifestations of the ugly side of consumer credit, debt.

Indians, as a general matter, have traditionally lived with a mentality of frugality. Through the absence of credit we have learned to only purchase what they are able to afford and know well the value of saving over years and years. There is no clearer example of this frugality than that the rickshaw driver begins just days after his daughter’s birth to save for her marriage decades later.

I fear that the important lessons through centuries of tradition and training may be washed away entirely by the rapid availability of credit in this economy. But more than a fear for the future economic health and traditions of India, I am forced to reflect on how little we heed those lessons in the western world today. Where are the fathers saving from the day their children are born for their children’s education? Where are the families collectively choosing to drive their jalopy one more year instead of spending money they don’t have on a shiny new car? These are no longer the values of the western world, and I think they are values we will shortly come to miss.

I hesitate to be too dramatic in a forum as public as a blog, but I believe we need to examine the costs our economy is having on ourselves. We need to begin to question whether economies such as India’s which we have condescendingly termed “growing” or “advancing”, presupposing that the western economy is the desired end, might not in fact hold some very valuable lessons for us. But rather than begin our reform in the common, yet largely unproductive way that social change is usually sought, through systemic criticism that quickly degrades into defeatism, I thought instead we might begin with the very practical step of taking action in our own lives. To that end, I’ve compiled a few resources by individuals who are rejecting our conventional notions about debt management and are instead proposing some simple, yet effective, means of retraining our minds to incorporate some of the economic values we may have forgotten.