A principle for our times?

Money advisers will be familiar with Mr Micawber’s principle, even if they are unfamiliar with the work of Charles Dickens, and the book from which the character, Mr Wilkins Micawber, quotes this line David Copperfield.

Why? Because it’s what they are spend most of their time doing: drawing up budgets from client’s income and expenditure and trying to get them to balance, in order to help the client live in line with the ‘Micawber Principle’.

However, the Wikipedia definition of Mr Micawber’s phrase is problematic: if the avoidance of debt is the key to long term happiness, then one would assume that those without debt are happy. Yet in the society we live in, this is not proven. Any money adviser will tell you that whilst it is certainly true that the most common reasons for debt are beyond the control of the individual debtor (unemployment, death, illness, relationship breakdown), we live in a society that thrives on a conceit of alienation: that the use of credit to buy consumer goods is encouraged, praiseworthy, necessary, even almost a civic duty; but that the flipside – living beyond one’s means, is unacceptable. And consumerism does not (can not and will not) bring real happiness. Debtor’s Gaol may well be long gone, but creditors today refer to debtors whose accounts are in arrears as exhibiting “delinquency”. Seriously.

The ‘Micawber Principle’ is still with us, and always will be as long as the concepts of credit and debt persist. Let’s hasten their end!