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Comment by happyjack | Hacker News Reader

I think the honest reality is that the game is rigged and dependent on a perpetual 7% growth type cycle. We have indebted future generations so much that it's going to crumble or the next 200 years of western civilization will be held to debt service. Millennials in western countries aren't having kids, and are stuck paying student loans (and other debt) while a 2 bedroom home in some suburbs that doesn't have a rotten foundation is $400k.

How does the western world grow 7% (or whatever rate needed after taxes, inflation, and profit) perpetually with stagnating birth rates, lowering carbon footprints, and shrinking real wages?

I'm not sure it can.

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Student loans are an American thing.

I paid 500€s/year to graduate in chemistry in Italy and have not incurred any debt.

Anecdotal, I also thought they were just an american thing, but they are also common otherplaces such as UK and even the Netherlands

> Student loans are an American thing.

Unfortunately, they're also becoming an "American export". E.g. Netherlands granted a study grant to all students up until 2015, when it was converted to a student loan [1]. The required amount is still lower and the terms are better than US, but the ball has started rolling. We are now waiting for the next wave of neoliberal policies to see average student debt surging.

[1] https://www.wittenborg.eu/new-dutch-student-loans-system-sta...

Why would you guys even allow this poison to infect your culture? We never had these benefits in the US so there was nothing to take away and many Americans are too poor to ever travel overseas and don't realize how things are done elsewhere. In fact even conservatives fight to maintain what we do have (eg. Social Security, Medicare) But Europe? You guys already have the benefits, aren't you going to get pissed off if they get taken away?

The starting points between Europe and USA may be different, but the methodology to contain reactions is the same: The boiling frog method [1], and playing the long game.

If the introduced change is subtle enough, only people directly affected will protest. In this case, students did protest for years, and they still do. But because the change is so subtle, it is easy to convincingly brand anyone protesting as unreasonable/reactionary/self-entitled/spoiled. E.g. "Do you complain about paying 20EUR/month for your DUO [2] loan, all while you can even skip payments with no repercussions when unemployed? An entitled lazy brat you are!".

Then, several years later, you can stage an audit on DUO to find out that it's "bleeding money". Now you have a free rein to shut it down and let the private sector to hand the student loans. All to save taxpayers' money, of course!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog [2] https://duo.nl/particulier/international-visitor/

I think this is worse… because the price is being hidden and also the real cost/payment for such an education.

Your country, during that time, has incurred debt which you’ll have to pay as a form of extra taxes. The path of least resistance in this case is to not pay as individual and leave it to the rest of community (or country).

Does this explain to you why young people are leaving Italy? It’s a form of arbitrage that’s being played on a global scale.

I'm now a taxpayer making good money and paying for other's education. I'm fine with that.

I plain despise arguments like yours, they lead nowhere but a more unjust, poorer and more dangerous society.

A debt contract always has a debtor and a creditor.

But the cost structure could very widely when there are different motivators. I suspect this is what is really happening. Colleges in the US are 5 star resorts wheres in Europe they are either old beautiful relics or just old boring buildings with no real amenities and a lot less staff needed to run the operations.

What I mean is that there's no way to indebt whole future generations.

Wealth might be distributed unequally, but debt over all is still a zero sum thing.

I agree that many people in many countries spend too many resources on education. Especially students' time. See Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education. See eg https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7t59x1/revi... for a review.

You make it sound like its a black and white thing. I disagree. If you can get your costs under control, that debt accrued now becomes an investment that should pay off the debt in the aggregate long run. After all this is not just money spent on a consumable. This is money spent on a resource(education) that generates more money(in the aggregate) in the form of productivity. The problem is that this is an extremely difficult problem given a large population. Because when you have a large population there ends up being graft that pulls value away and in the worst case scenario(the situation in Communist Russia) the majority of the value is stripped away leaving nothing but the debt. However, that does not mean it can't be made to work well. It seems like many European nations can somewhat get more value than investment (so far).

Your thinking seems to be a bit muddled. You seem to be mixing up nominal concepts (basically, money and accounting and debt) and real concepts (capital goods / investing etc).

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