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Comment by catilinam | Hacker News Reader

Damn, yeah I took a full ride instead of paying the 70k back when I was deciding for college…agree would feel a bit miffed if everyone suddenly was forgiven all debt

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I never really understood this kind of jealousy because other people are given a break. It doesn't make your situation any worse and it makes theirs better.

I agree with you on an individual level, and that it is unhealthy to care too much about someone around you getting a break that you didn't get yourself... But that breaks down really quickly on a societal level. Our society is organized around at least a semblance of fairness. So for example even if you pay your taxes and you probably wouldn't mind if your neighbor got away with not paying as much as you do... but you'd probably be pretty pissed if every other person you know just does not pay anything and gets away with it. It breaks down confidence in the system.

In morocco for example, that feeling of unfairness just leads to people doing everything to make their situation better when they get the occasion, because everyone does it. It got slowly but surely worse and worse, and we are now left with a population that is much more cynical and disillusioned than it was a few decades ago.

Just as an example, if your building permit is stuck in approval hell and the local official offers you to pay 1000dirhams to speed the process up, does it really hurt anyone? No, but it makes the entire process seem futile for everyone else, even if it maybe shouldn't.

I think that's a bit similar to the student loan debate, and if anything the loan forgiveness looks much much more shameless to me. Because at the end of the day, college graduates are statistically doing better than a lot of the people that are asked to foot the bill. The proposal is also completely self serving, with almost 0 benefits (a supposed cash injection to the economy isn't one) to anyone else. It's so contrary to everything that is being pushed for right now too, because it's just giving an already privileged population another privilege that is usually very rarely granted.

Yes, but that's the opposite problem: a dysfunctional bureaucracy will tend to become more dysfunctional over time until people have had enough of it and reverse the direction of the spiral usually by main force. Morocco could be a very nice country on all fronts but it would take an entirely different government including a significant part of the civil service to start realizing that potential.

France would not be the France that we know today without the French Revolution, which both remade France and put the rest of Europe's royals on notice that they were expendable in the most literal sense. Get rid of the parasites and suddenly you'll find there is budget for all kinds of improvements.

Everbody's paying for it in the form of tax, I would rather not bail out universities/banks that prey on the financial illeteracy of high school graduates.

> illeteracy

Indeed!

But that aside: forgiving this debt is not about bailing out universities or banks, it is to help those individuals. That the banks get the money doesn't really matter in the longer term, the quality of life improvement for the individuals affected more than offsets that and if this didn't happen they would still have to pay the banks.

I think it would improve everyones quality of life if they suddenly didn't have to pay back their loans, however there is also the downside where the rest of society now has to pay for your mistakes.

Student loans are not always mistakes and quite a few people who are in trouble with debt are not in that situation due to things they themselves controlled (such as, but not limited to medical issues, divorces, natural disasters etc).

I am aware that there are people who succeeded despite their debt and now say that it wasn't a mistake. I am also aware that there are many reasons why someone can't pay off a debt. However, there are also reasons why the part of society who didn't fall for the college debt scam don't want to pay for the part of society who did fall for the college debt scam.

If other people get out of debt society as a whole improves, including you and everybody else. It's not a zero sum game.

> society as a whole improves, including you and everybody else

Massive assumption. People justify to themselves that something is good on a society-level when really it's just good on a selfish-level.

I believe that this can actually be bad on a society-level due to college debt being in the trillions.

The problem is not that people have college debt that they can't pay back. The problem is that there is such a thing as college debt to begin with. Education should be free. At all levels, to all takers.

I think the issue is even deeper.

I agree that education should be free, but not colleges. Colleges are involved in the business of credentialing and monopolising entry level jobs.

There is no use in education being free if there are credentialing businesses charging $320k (which I believe is going to increase as they teach more highschoolers why college debt is worth it) in order to use your skills in the job market.

Colleges who have a history of exploitative pricing have no place in the future of free education.

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