PhronesisWe analyze debt through the lens of the Displacement Framework. Debt is the formal instrument by which one party's displacement—need, financial shortfall, desperation—is converted into perpetual obligation to another party. In formal terms, debt prices (the debtor's displacement at the moment of borrowing) rather than (the actual cost of the service rendered). Interest is the mechanism by which displacement is kept alive and growing: D(_debt) increases over time rather than returning to zero.
This constitutes a formally structured violation of Displacement Condition 7 (DC7: fairness, C(T) _T) operating at civilizational scale. We derive the Glitch formula for debt, analyze compound interest as a displacement trap, examine student debt, medical debt, and sovereign debt as canonical cases, recover the ancient condemnation of usury as a pre-formal statement of DC7 violation, and identify DC7-compliant lending structures that partially repair the framework's fairness condition.