Margaret Atwood is an energetic woman who ingests loads of vitamins and writes top-notch fiction, poetry and essays. She also labours tirelessly and cheerfully in the vineyards of promotion.

You may have heard her on air or read about her latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. It consists of five chapters, which Atwood has compressed into this year's Massey Lectures, presented all this week on CBC Radio's Ideas.

Margaret Atwood (Canadian Press)

Many commentators have remarked on how prescient Atwood is to write a book on debt, just as international stock markets collapse. But how did she know this might happen three years ago, when she was planning the Massey Lectures?

Simple, she says: she reads advertisements as she travels on public transport.

She is one of those rare literary types who have a root sense of commerce and the marketplace. In her younger days, in fact, she worked in market research.

Save your string

A few years ago, Atwood says, she began noticing ads to help people with their overwhelming personal debt. This was new.

When she was growing up in the 1940s and '50s, ads might discreetly feature ladies' foundation garments and refrigerators. But that was before the advent of the credit card with their own dark secrets that you can conveniently tuck away.

Atwood grew up in a house where her mother kept a ledger. Accounts had to balance. You paid for your fridge on a layaway plan. The overriding rule was to stay clear of debt.

Atwood herself still saves string. Old habits die hard when you grew up in a frugal regimen.

But oh how that all has changed. Many people don't (or can't) save anymore. They want what they want right now.

If a bank sends you a credit card in the mail, it can make you think you are entitled to what you want (even if you can't pay for it up front).

Bursting bubbles

Now when she set out to write these lectures, Atwood says she had no special intelligence that the economy was about to implode.

But it was also no secret that the U.S. was going into gigantic debt to pay for its invasion of Iraq and continuing rounds of tax cuts. The Clinton budget surplus from the 1990s was overwhelmed by the Bush deficit as the new century took hold.

More than a few economists had been warning about bubbles that would burst. One analyst I heard recently said he'd been predicting it since 1990.

So, you didn't really have to be that prescient. You just had to open your eyes and absorb the zeitgeist, as Atwood does anyway as an author and keen observer.

Oh, and read the subway ads.

It's only Daddy's car

Still, many of us don't want to believe what's in front of our faces. We're like adolescents, Atwood argues, pointing out that the mature brain doesn't fully develop until 25 at least.

Even grownups — and entire nations, it seems — have trouble believing in long-term consequences.

Atwood loves analogies from the natural world (her father was a biologist). She observes that we humans like to gorge on that low hanging fruit dangling before us almost by instinct. Our primordial ancestors were primed to eat things immediately because these opportunities might not be there tomorrow, she says.

But we're not living in the savannah. Most of us live in suburbs or in city homes with giant pantries known as grocery stories nearby. We should be able to organize our desires and appetites better.

Good debt, bad debt

Atwood is not a moral prig. She believes debt is actually fine as long as you can manage it. There's good debt you can pay for and bad debt you can't.

Unfortunately, too many good people, students among them, take on huge debts and become overwhelmed by the experience.

The result is that the whole debt economy has become toxic, not just those messy corporate ones that keep getting talked about on the business pages.

In the end, debt becomes part of a moral accounting as well an economic one. The moral compass in Atwood detected a time of reckoning would eventually arrive. Hence, her prescient Payback and the Massey Lectures.

Ancient balances

There is another supremely important idea at the centre of Atwood's book. She states it boldly in her first chapter called Ancient Balances. "I postulate that there's another ancient foundation without which debt and credit structures could not exist: our sense of fairness."

"Children start saying 'That's not fair' at the age of four or so, long before they're interested in sophisticated investment vehicles or have any sense of the value of coins and bills," she writes in Payback.

In one of her favourite stories, monkeys were trained to trade pebbles for cucumber slices. When one monkey was given a more valuable grape, the other monkeys went, well, ape. They started throwing pebbles out of the cage and they refused to cooperate any longer.

Atwood's bottom line: our sense of fairness is ingrained, part of what makes us human.

The Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, used our inborn sense of right and wrong to argue for the existence of God. Even thieves have a sense of fairness, at least among themselves, he said, while concluding that a moral sense had been implanted in human beings by a creator.

But you can also remain a godless Darwinian in good standing and argue as well that fairness has survival value: it helps the tribe continue. The motivation can just as easily be the result of natural selection and evolution.

Settling accounts

Whatever her religious beliefs, Atwood believes fairness is a fundamental human attribute. Though, like religious believers, she knows it can be endlessly abused and corrupted.

This brings me to another Atwood-like synchronicity, one she doesn't mention in the book: the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the U.S.

As many commentators keep noting, Obama has been elected to right the moral balance of his country. His election platform spoke of a fair tax policy for working and middle Americans, as well as adequate health care for all Americans, including the more than 40 million who are currently uninsured.

The privileged and the wealthy would have to pay their fair share. That principle of fairness and equality is back.

What's more, in the moral accounting of history, the election of a black man to the presidency of the most powerful country in the world is without doubt exhilarating. On the ledger of America, the original sin that is slavery is about to be at least partially repaid.

Obama is already talking about "sacrifice," as he said in his victory speech in Chicago. That word was a no-no for years. Instead, the message was to go shopping when times were tough and let a volunteer, working-class army fight your wars (on borrowed money).

Whether Americans can face the enormity of its challenges, at a time of grand promises, is still to be seen. Certainly Americans will have to be more judicious, more resolutely grown up, as they decide which tasty fruit they should pick from the bankrupt money tree.

There are undoubtedly lessons here, too, for Canadians with our own low-hanging fruit problems. But at least for now, we can sit back, munch an apple and muster our hopes by contemplating these timely Massey Lectures before it's too late.