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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

This is common across so many industries now. The number of people stressed by student loans, childcare, and other typical expenses is extreme. It’s easy for someone to appear more productive by having fewer or no kids - but disastrous for the economy in the long run.

How much of the recent US economic growth can be attributed to monetization of public and private balance sheets?

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It's hard to compare student loans--debts taken on willingly by the smartest and most privileged members of society--to childcare costs.

Not everyone who takes on this debt is "the smartest and most privileged members of society", and childcare costs are outrageous (according to several families I know; I haven't felt financially secure enough to have my own progeny and at this stage in life it seems unlikely I'll have the opportunity).

That's why I said "it's hard to compare them". One of them is a true problem, and the other is a debt that fully informed, smart people elected to take on and plan for.

Nobody is fully informed about anything, whether parenting or deciding to assume debt for potential education. Not everyone who goes to college is smart in all aspects(including finances), and not everyone graduates college. These are both true problems whether you choose to acknowledge this or not.

> fully informed, smart people elected to take on and plan for.

In practice, this is completely false. When I was about to graduate not too long ago, there was an entire cottage industry of (perhaps unwitting) propagandists pushing student loans on highschool students as a "no brainer" investment. "You'll make the money back in 2 years, tops! Now go and find yourself"

Placing blame on any of those students who were not able to make the money back quickly and are now struggling is either a display of ignorance or lack of empathy.

40% of people with student loans didn't graduate. Lots of those people probably aren't the "smartest and most privileged" you're thinking about.

This video "What everyone gets wrong about student loans" really taught me a lot of things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzY-b2Vj9Ug

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