[VLM]

"The whole idea of being 'unbanked' or 'underbanked' is so foreign to me"

I explained it to Korean coworker that our debtors prison is implemented as a house arrest or like an economic parole release.

So if you owe child support because you're unemployed you can't use a bank because the money would disappear. You can't get money from a job in the system it would disappear so cash pay please. Or you can't go to the courthouse and get it fixed because lawyers cost money and see above you're unemployed. Once you're in debtors prison there's a whole bunch of things you can no longer do, just like being under house arrest or parole. For example, for a couple decades 90s-10s we had universal default as a stated written policy. We still have it, just unstated, which confuses foreigners. On paper we don't have universal default since 2010 or so. In practice we still have it today, more or less.

Adding to the complexity we do have actual debtors prisons most famously in the rural south but to some extent or another there are some everywhere.

I guess another way to explain it is part of our culture is explicit and written and people read it, like generally speaking the bible or the -ez single page income tax form. Then there's a layer thats written and people make a great show of not reading like mortgage or car loans or insurance contracts. Next down there's unwritten stuff that people understand like the debtors prison thing is I think fairly uncontroversial and reasonably well informed. Below that there's stuff we kinda unconsciously by osmosis know, like the "unbanked"="house arrest debtors prison" or "underbanked"="financial equivalent of parole complete with abused arbitrary rules". At the bottom there's weird esoteric stuff like non-propaganda related economic theory and history. And the level of awareness is extremely uneven across the entire nation (fairly uniform across subcultures, mostly).