The salient point of the article is that between the towers of personal responsibility and social protection, the community determines the culture. In this case, the culture of credit card debt (plus more) became socially acceptable.
This point gave me pause because our startup changes our spending habits depending on the community we're around. Let's take the small example of cooking. When it was just us, we would focus on the product, and then each night, someone would cook (cheapest possible method). Then when we started getting into the tech community and received a little bit of seed funding, our culture shifted toward eating out more and we stopped being as stingy. The more we read Techcrunch, go to SXSW, hang out with designers, the more we get lax. We aren't on fire, we're just in a hurry.
This point gave me pause because our startup changes our spending habits depending on the community we're around. Let's take the small example of cooking. When it was just us, we would focus on the product, and then each night, someone would cook (cheapest possible method). Then when we started getting into the tech community and received a little bit of seed funding, our culture shifted toward eating out more and we stopped being as stingy. The more we read Techcrunch, go to SXSW, hang out with designers, the more we get lax. We aren't on fire, we're just in a hurry.