Yes, you are, but that’s in part because far less of our tax dollars now go to pay for public college education. Individuals are shouldering more of the burden than in the previous 60 or so years, as tuition costs are rising. They are rising because there is a growth in university administration as well as less public funds for schools (especially through grants for lower income students, etc).
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I was specifically addressing the idea of taking Jubilee seriously as economic policy.
I agree the amount of debt required for college is absurd. There are ways of addressing this that don’t involve debt default/forgiveness, at least going forward.
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Jubliee wasn’t wiping out all debts all the time, though. It was (according to the wikipedia page that @anon73430903 linked to) was the end of a long period of time (50 years, apparently).
But there are other options other than outright debt forgiveness (which is sometimes a SOCIAL good, I think - when it’s a choice between allowing people to fall into extreme poverty, for example, which has no redeeming social or economic value) - non-profits buying out debt, for example. Occupy did this with a program named rolling jubilee a few years ago:
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Sounds like a great idea.
Even a long cycle would radically affect investment. The wiki page also mentioned private property as well going through a return to the commons and re-sold. Would you buy a house in year 30 of the cycle? Would you fix a leaky roof or cracked foundation in year 45? Would any bank make a business loan with terms beyond the date of Jubilee?
Maybe we should make the universities the lenders. So when you go to college they don’t get paid up-front and have to wait until you start making money before they recoup their losses.
Or we could mandate a warranty on your degree that states that if you aren’t earning over the median wage after 5 years the university has to pay off your student loans…
As long as everyone knows and agrees the length of the cycle, people would find a way to live perfectly happily and make money.
Fixed term loans are a thing, you know. Shares are priced differently depending on whether they are ex- dividend or not. You can do the same with houses.
50 years is a pretty long time in terms of a human lifespan. It’s only when you start thinking that corporations are people that that sort of length of time becomes a real issue.
Edit to add - I think the real problem in implementing the Biblical jubilee would be the ‘let the fields lie fallow’ part. I can’t see how we’d make it through a year, let alone two.
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It kind of seems like you’re projecting back modern banking practices into the past. I’m not an ancient historian, but I’d guess access to banking would probably be limited to an elite few, and that long term investment (say, in public infrastructure) was probably far more dependent on the ruler (whoever that was). I’d guess Roman had the most well-developed banking system in the ancient world, and even there, I’d guess that most people didn’t take out loans to buy a house. the elite inherited it from their families, or the middling folks likely won them for their military service.
If you know that jubliee is coming up, would you begin a long term investment project, or would you wait until AFTER the jubliee year? Individuals work within the systems they live in. These places somehow managed to exist with different structures governing their daily lives.
So, we should add YET another layer of bureaucracy to the university system? That doesn’t seem helpful to me. It’s already top-heavy and bureaucratic enough. We used to have public sources of both grants and loans, backed by the federal government, that kept terms low.
It could be a secular version of jubliee, though. In a state without an official religion, it can operate on similar principles, etc.
Here’s a question, does modern Israel adhere to jubliee or is it more personal thing now that Jews are expected to adhere to and honor?
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But that’s really my whole point. Someone suggested jubilee, seriously, in a modern context. I don’t think it would work with a modern economy. Probably worked fine in an ancient agrarian society.
Not to speak for the @anon73430903, I don’t think they were suggesting we take it up whole cloth as it is described in religious text. I thought they were just throwing it out there as an example of debt forgiveness in history and that we could maybe perhaps see our way to constructing something in the modern context (one example is the one I noted above, that you seemed to like, non-profits buying and forgiving loans).
Forgiving individual debt in particular cases already does happen, BTW (where, for example, pretty clear that the person literally has no way to repay a loan for whatever reason). It’s just more often than not, debt is bought out by a third party and they then essentially hound the people who owe. Let me tell you, there is nothing like getting a debt collector calling when you’re at the person’s death bed. That’s a real scream.
I’d argue that our economic system is weighted too much in favor of corporations over individuals. I think we could do with some balance and consumer protection. Predatory lending is a thing that the working poor regularly have to contend with, because they have little to no other options. Payday lending very rarely helps the people it was intended to, and instead just moves what little wealth exists at the bottom and moves it up. I don’t see how keeping people impoverished helps our broader economy.
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Well sure, it wouldn’t work in practice, but in theory it could be great!
Seriously though, I know it’s a pretty bad idea but what I’m getting at is that right now universities have an incentive to just enrol as many students as possible and they don’t really have a stake in whether those students get any long-term benefit from their degree. I don’t know that just flipping it around as I’ve suggested would really help because then the best bet for schools is to only take on students who they expect to end up wealthy, which would be people with wealthy parents.
I think the system here in Australia is a bit better than the US one in that you only pay back the loan when you earn over a certain amount (roughly the median wage), so if you get a degree in something that doesn’t have much industry demand and never score a top job you never have to pay it back. That still leaves the state holding the bag for the loans, but at least it gives the government an incentive to be selective in extending the loans, to ensure fees are kept down and not to certify phoney colleges.
I’m also a bit sceptical about what the universities are selling us. I get that someone with a degree can expect to make more money later in life, but did they actually learn something that makes them better at the job or have they just paid a toll to get in? If it’s the latter then why not dispense with the classes altogether and just sell special hats with a number on the front that shows how much the hat cost?
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It certainly helps keep some people rich!
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Thank you! I went to college for one of those STEM degrees that everyone says are the best ROI. But 99% of the value that I got from college came from the electives. That ‘employee training’ was woefully out-of-date and the way that they do things in academia is worlds away from how it’s done in a corporate environment. OTOH, the philosophy, psychology, literature, history, economics, etc. holds up just fine.
Now, well into my career, given a choice, I’d rather have a team that has a diverse set of education - one who majored in biology, one chemistry, one literature, one psychology, one anthropology, one basket weaving or puppeteering, that each bring a variety of interesting viewpoints to the table, than a homogenous group that all majored in outdated technology and nonrealistic scenarios which have to be untrained before they can start on-the-job training.
College is not job training. An education is very valuable in its own right, but it is not job training. Our society has lost sight of that.
That may as well be done for any degree that is ostensibly for a job instead of for education.
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From a lefty point of view, education is a common good and paying for it like this is downright perverse. But, clearly, this sort of reasoning does not appeal to you. Fair enough. It does to me, but let me try to meet you halfway.
Here’s the problem though: loaning money to teenagers to pursue an education in a filed they aren’t sure of, where there’s no certain way to predict success, and where repayment depends on the future state of the job market which is completely impossible to predict makes for a spectacularly poor business decision. If they were loans like any other, you’d see them given only to, oh I don’t know, either people who don’ really need one or to certified prodigies in some field that’s near-guaranteed to bring return-on-investment. Everyone else would have to kiss Uni goodbye.
However, student loans are special loans and already drenched in government intervention: they are guaranteed, for a start, and, in America, with the intriguing proviso that they’ll follow you unto death. You can’t bankrupt your way out of them.
So, firstly, if you believe in the power of markets, you ought to be against this because it absolutely deforms the market and encourages tax-farming of the generations which are supposed to be your economic base in years to come and provide all-important aggregate demand.
Secondly, if you want to consider consequences, consider what this brilliant scheme did in America: the ‘free money’ for education made the tuition fees shoot up at a rate well above inflation to the point where the costs are so distended that free education is impossible to implement properly, because the prices are so comically out of control. It’s educational tulipomania, with en eternally bullish market. Not a good combination.
This sort of measure—the government incentives for X solution, is typical of a certain faux-left set of politicians insofar as it doesn’t solve the problem, but masks it and kicks the can a bit down the road. If you had the Austerian Lunatics in charge, hardly anybody would be able to afford Uni but, hey, at least you could see that. But with this, oh sure, people can afford Uni, everything seems fine, except naturally, thirty years down the line the prices are preposterous and whole generations drag behind them vast, growing piles of debt, stunting their spending power, and crippling the economy.
Whoops. But, hey, the people who dreamed it all up got elected, didn’t they, and they are safely dead now, and you can’t vote against it because the first few generations to grow up without Uni are doomed, and you can’t replace it with a sane free-at-point-of-delivery system because you can’t afford it, so you kick the can down the road hoping that the accumulated problems won’t gang up on you.
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YAAAAASSSSSSSSS PLZ N THX
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Well, it should be a solid liberal arts education that makes someone a better citizen, as well as skilled in a particular area for a particular career. But some parts of society have decided that having people who have wider horizons and the ability to think outside the box are far less important that job training. Not everything should be about making money and it shouldn’t just be the elites who have the opportunity to expand their horizons and understanding of the world, IMO. I mean, are we really only there in order to work a job? Really?
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Any discussion of college loans that doesn’t start with this is doomed to futility. This is why we’re in the current situation to begin with, with the nasty non-dischargeable debt, and the gov’t backing that allowed the money spigot to run too freely allowing the cost to skyrocket way beyond inflation. Heck, one of my teachers in junior high/high school, back in the 70s/80s, bragged about not paying back college loans and didn’t have a problem recommending this to us. The foolish nature of unsecured debt gave us the current shitshow.
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Add to that the growth of university bureaucracy and the attempt to disempower individual departments, and this is pretty spot on.
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When the only loans people can get are predatory, and should have been illegal to begin with, then the creditors are at fault and should pay the price. At the very least, the interest should be retroactively reduced to what it was before the system was privatized. All that interest that they collected over and above the lower interest rate should be converted to principle. If that means refunds, so be it.
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That’s a really good way for them to drop giving degrees in anything but accounting, engineering, law, medicine . . .
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Well, hey, isn’t history and literature entirely superfluous to modern life? The past? WHO CARES! AND BOOKS ARE FOR LOSERS! And don’t get me started on scams like women’s studies and African American studies! Who needs people with degrees in THOSE fields running around! They might start to get ideas like “they have value and worth” and “they matter in the scope of human existence.” Can’t have that now, can we!?!? /s
(me right now)
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