Americans are now more in debt than ever before in history. While many debtors blame themselves for their indebtedness, their ability to choose how much debt to incur has already been institutionally over-determined--debt is experienced personally, but it operates structurally. Americans are in debt today because their economy depends on their indebtedness for its very profitability. Since the 1920s, American manufacturers have relied ever-increasingly on consumer debt to absorb the tremendous productivity increases of mass production. Indeed, consumer credit made mass consumption possible. Government programs and business policies that encouraged Americans to take on debt made sense to borrowers in the midst of a growth economy because money needed today could be paid back in a more prosperous tomorrow. This debt economy, though not accidental, did not spring forth one day fait accompli. The institutions which lent, governed and enforced the repayment of debt coalesced haphazardly, responding to business pressures and government policies in addition to consumer demands. Manufacturers, bankers, retailers, collectors, regulators, and borrowers all had different and often contradictory perspectives on what form consumer credit ought to take; their conflicts over the debt relation raged at the statehouse as much as the register. Consumer debt's explosion was not the natural expression of the market nor was it the hegemonic will of a master planner, but was instead the historically contingent creation of financial institutions, the state, and the American people all struggling to make ends meet within the volatile circumstances of an industrial economy becoming a post-industrial economy.

Historians and social critics have neglected the rise of the institutions, policies and practices which constituted this debt-driven economy, concerning themselves more with pining for the postwar's affluence and lamenting its demise. Debtor Nation shows how debt was at the core of both the postwar's affluence and its decline, demanding a reconsideration of that period's nostalgic legacy. While growth persisted, as it did in the postwar period until the 1970s, consumers experienced few deleterious effects from their borrowing. As postwar growth transitioned into stagflation and greater income inequality, however, cracks appeared in the foundation of the economy. The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, along with the concomitant loss of high-paying industrial jobs, derailed Americans' expectations of the future. Consumer debt skyrocketed, not because consumers began to borrow, but because they continued to borrow as they and their parents had done since World War II. The infrastructure of the debt economy, created and predicated on prosperity, whose cultural logic and economic stability was ill-suited for the end of growth, remained long after that prosperity ended.