Debt is not a good product

There’s an interesting conversation going on over at Boing Boing about the current economic downturn and how to help people understand it.

The genesis of the discussion is a guest-blogger who says:

I just had a great hour-long phone conversation with an old friend, Will Dana (now editor of Rolling Stone), who has strongly encouraged me to come up with one-liners that tell the truth about the economic/banking fiasco – but that do it in almost zen-koan fashion. He thinks this might be the only way to penetrate ongoing confusion and resistance to moving beyond our falsely held assumptions about money and business.

Trying to illustrate that America has moved from making things towards making money, he asks readers for their help in coming up with easy-to-grasp “bumper sticker” length nuggets that will help people understand what’s going on in the economy and why it went south.

My first thought was, “Didn’t oversimplification get us into this mess in the first place?” and I was going to post that, until I saw that someone else had said that exact thing in the comments already.

But most people seem to be taking the challenge at face value.

There’s also some debate over whether a good one-liner can be simple enough for people to understand as well as complex enough that it simmers in their brain for a long while, and makes them think about the underlying concept.

In that way, the initial “Debt is not a good product” is pretty good. What do you think?