For his book Bad Paper, Jake Halpern investigated the world of American debt collectors. In a review, Thomas Geoghegan considers what makes people pay up:
In [debt collector and ex-con Brandon] Wilson’s case—and I admit I came to like Wilson—it’s because he knows how to “marry the debtor.” He doesn’t threaten; he doesn’t talk about bringing a suit, much less raise the specter of incarceration. It’s true that’s all illegal under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. But the real point here is that such measures don’t get results. No, as Wilson notes, a good collector is even and caring. The good collector will say things like “It’s the right thing to do” and “You’ll feel better about yourself.”
Here’s what collectors know: People want to pay. It’s what Porfiry knows about Raskolnikov: He wants to confess. The good collector helps the debtors get out of their mental jails.
After explaining, Wilson’s collectors dare the author to make a call; for me, and perhaps for Halpern, it’s the most unsettling part of the book.
This is not a writer who calls attention to himself unduly, so the encounter that prompts him to enter into the narrative stream of Bad Paper is significant. Halpern does try to marry the debtor. He tries to show empathy. He listens to the woman Wilson assigns him. She is not a deadbeat. She has been ill. She is bipolar, didn’t he know? But Halpern lets her go. He writes that he lacks a real collector’s rapport with people, together with Wilson’s “innate sense of when to segue from courtship back to the unpleasant matter of collecting.” But the real problem, he admits, is that he doesn’t have the drive. If he were desperate enough, if he had to do this for a living, if the alternative were to push dope out on the streets . . . well, he might be much readier to squeeze her. As he later quotes one collector, who happens to be African American, debt in America is the “white man’s dope.”
So a dealer can have only a certain amount of empathy. Or, as one collection manager tells the author: “You have to empathize with debtors but not have sympathy, because if you have sympathy you don’t get paid.”
The Dish 