A Debt to Education | Hacker News Reader

A Debt to Education

plough.com

29 pointsscott_s13 comments

The publication, Plough, is a Christian publisher, and the author is a Christian pastor. The end of the essay has a call to action to the Christian community for how to consider debt and treat people with debt (more humanely, of course). I am not a Christian, but I found the author's framing of how society at large treats debt useful and insightful.

Just for some further context. Plough is a publication of the Bruderhof community which is Christian but in a much more radical sense than mainstream Christianity (no private property, radical non-violence, etc.).

I've visited their community in upstate NY and really enjoyed it.

This article includes the assertion:

"Think, for instance, of the common idea that individual recycling can stave off climate change – this in spite of the fact that one hundred companies produce 71 percent of carbon emissions."

Rather shocking if true.

It's 'true'.

But those companies are largely oil companies that aren't polluting for giggles - but are responding to consumer demand.

So if consumers demand less fuel, plastics etc. it is possible there would be a 'trickle-up' effect.

FullFact had a good analysis: https://fullfact.org/news/are-100-companies-causing-71-carbo...

"This includes the emissions released when the fossil fuels they sold were subsequently used by their customers."

It's also clear that simply fulfilling a demand does not mean that we shouldn't be aware of what needs changing, and indeed some things which are demanded in society should not be fulfilled. It seems disingenuous to paint these small number of companies as simple mediators between demand and supply when they're the ones supplying. It's also the case that the tastes and preferences of consumers are influenced heavily by advertising and certain amenities which are today only possible through these polluting businesses.

The majority of various populations has demanded truly grotesque things throughout human history, including but not limited to mass murder and injustice. I am skeptical of the argument that the ones (i) manufacturing this 'consent' (ii) agreeing to supply it (fully aware of the mechanisms through which the desire is produced) are innocent.

Consider this: if the only way to prevent such large scale pollution is to modify the desires of the demand side (an idea which I see no reason to be the case anyway), it could also be justified for a government to force such companies to conduct mass-advertising showing just how harmful the effects of production are.

I'm yet to see a realistic proposal for coordinating a reduction in demand, and I am yet to be convinced that the individualization of the problem is helpful to the goal of an eco-sustainable society. On the other hand, if your goal is to prioritize the ability to make profits (no matter how harmful) then you could continue to appeal to solutions which have consistently failed to gain traction on a national or international scale (such as "consumers demanding less" or boycotting).

If you count government owned enterprises as companies, yeah

Reading something from a specific, embodied religious tradition (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu) provides a refreshing set of justifications and perspective to the secular mindset that we exist within that we rarely consider it from the outside. Like a fish discovering oxygen in air. Interesting article.

You may also find this Usury faq interesting: https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-...

It's from a Catholic perspective, but to a large degree the primary impact of that is just to take a step away from modern ideas and draw from a historical position not well studied or understood by other people. There is not very much "bible" or "pope" in it.

It is also directly related to the topic at hand; student loan debt is considered as a form of usury.

I'm not Catholic, for what it's worth. Whether being a Protestant impacts my opinion of the topic matter... well... "it's complicated", as the social networks say. But I still found it to be a very interested intellectual case, and there are plenty of non-Catholic and non-Prostestant cultures over the millenia that have considered usury a crime as well, too. I wouldn't be that surprised our culture will yet make it on to the list of cultures that discover it's a bad idea as well, on its own merits, regardless of who notices.

Also, I think a lot of HN will actually find the ideas quite appealing even so. A lot of financial shenanigans that draw a lot of complaints on HN are covered by this conception of usury.

What's most interesting about the article is that it manages to completely skip over why it was extremely useful for medieval notions of usury to not apply to Jews. Specifically, anti-Semitism was so widespread that it was socially acceptable for someone powerful to borrow money and decide to kill or expel their counterparties afterwards.

Which is to say notions of usury served to legitimize theft from outsiders. The rest is a shocking amount of window-dressing and apologetics.

In a way, that's not relevant to the point being made. "X is a sin/bad thing" is not made less true by "X has occurred", "X has been used by political powers", or "even people who agreed X is a bad thing have put great effort into finding ways to do it anyhow".

I posted this because in the modern world, "usury is a particular and bad thing" is a fresh viewpoint, and yet, one that a lot of people here may find themselves quite sympathetic to. The idea that student loans are really getting into "indentured servitude" levels of exploitativeness is in the air, and it turns out that rather than a novel observation, it's actually an ancient one, and it can be helpful to "cheat" on some of the debates and understandings by reading the end of the book instead of trying to start from scratch.

You're absolutely right. Usury as sin is not in any way a novel idea. You are also unquestionably correct that it can be helpful to learn from the past on the subject!

Is it perhaps possible that some might opine that the historical context of an idea is worth knowing as part of reading the end of the book? It just might be worth considering that the historical implementations of policy around usury could not be divorced from the abstract reasoning.

In a way, it's like discussing historical Communism and Communist thought while pretending Stalin, Lenin, and Mao never existed. They all form part of the historical context that really needs to be considered an integral part of the whole.

Again, you're completely correct. There's a great deal to be learned from history!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com