Now here’s something that doesn’t happen every day.  Leading Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood is about to do The CBC Massey Lectures 2008 relating to the credit crisis, of all things.  This is a major annual event in Canada, five consecutive one hour radio programs on CBC Ideas, with the lectures collected into a book.  They will be broadcast this next week (Nov 10 – 14; includes streaming audio on the internet) and will likely be available as podcasts (though this wouldn’t be definite).  This from the Massey Lectures site (which also has book ordering info):

Payback is not about practical debt management or high finance. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies.

Margaret Atwood writes “These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they’re about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense – from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.”

For Doomers with a sense of irony here’s a review by Canada’s leading expert in "social thoughtlessness and selfishness"

Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a very provocative reconciliation of moral with financial indebtedness, and of the need to repay debts. She lays out a learned but never pedantic or turgid cul­tural history of the evolution of debt to trespass, to social thoughtlessness and selfishness. Despite the heavy moral content of her message, Ms. Atwood never ceases to be an elegant stylist with a fine sense of humour.

In these five Massey lectures, Ms. Atwood puts down the anthropological roots of a sense of fair­ness in matters of exchange. She describes the trade-off between material and moral success. Debtors and creditors are “joined at the hip,” and could not exist without each other. No one would lend if not reasonably confident of being repaid, and there would be no borrowers if there were no lenders.