this is a noble cause. like many, i have causes i'm passionate about, to which i donate my time and money. but it's quite a different thing when i force everyone around me to prioritize my own particular goals. why don't we take this $500B of canceled debt and direct that into supplying mosquito nets to malaria-prone regions of the world instead? obviously, that would help more people, and more significantly, than wiping clean our own debts.

"strawman", i hear you say? it's only a strawman if you deny utilitarianism and admit that our opinions on how to do good in the world are allowed to vary. at which point: why should you get to force me to act toward your good at the expense of my own good -- or vice versa?

there's room in this approach to governmental funding for a social safety net: a thing which is not so much about doing good in the world as ensuring some base level of living which secures the continuation of society in the broadest of form. at which point, this loan issue is only tangentially related: nobody should be forced onto the streets because they can't make their student loan payment. nobody should be forced to choose between feeding their family or paying their loan. i am happy to pay my dues into a system that guarantees these things; but forgiving loans to anyone making < $125,000 is doing way more than this.

i don't want to be what-about-ist, but i do want to illustrate that there are real tradeoffs. i pay taxes equivalent to 3x my living expenses. it's a relatively frugal lifestyle, with roommates, home-cooking and no travel. after 5 years, i'm half-way to being able to own a starter-home in the city i grew up in. you say we have progressive taxation (last year i reached the social security contribution limit for the first time in my life, actually decreasing my effective tax rate), but this is still a nontrivial burden for someone who really hasn't secured his own future yet. over the years i had worked my way up to donating 5% of every paycheck to EA causes. i canceled these recurring donations two months ago as my living expenses and the cost of the home i'm saving for both rose. quite literally: inflation correlated to public/deficit spending led me to cut my own charitable donations.

i want to do good in this world, much as you do. but there's a give-and-take everywhere you look, even if it's diffuse or hard to identify. you can only solve so many social ills via compulsory redistribution until you inadvertently worsen other things. this is why i so heavily favor spending which fixes systemic issues (with the opportunity of benefiting untold generations) over one-time transfers which divert resources from unknowable pursuits toward temporary patches. i looked into my own university (University of Washington), by the way: their endowment is large enough to cover -- by very rough estimate -- about half of tuition in perpetuity; but not enough to refund their graduates.

1. Again with the false dichotomies.

2. The total debt only exists as an abstraction. That money is not directly available. If it was, then the debt would be paid off! In fact many student loan debtors were in default or income-based forbearance before the 2020 pandemic suspension of payments. In 2019, student loan payments were $70 billion per year, which is only 4% of the outstanding debt. https://slate.com/business/2021/03/student-loan-total-annual...

> why should you get to force me to act toward your good at the expense of my own good -- or vice versa?

I feel that you're steering into some grand philosophical debate about the existence of government itself that's not directly relevant and specific to the student loan issue.

Keep in mind that universities themselves have always been heavily subsidized by governments in various ways. Universities as we know them wouldn't exist without the government, and there wouldn't be student loan debt without universities, so in a sense the debt problem is of the government's own creation.

You say you support keeping tuition low, but that involves massive, permanent taxpayer subsidy, of the kind you don't seem to like.

> you say we have progressive taxation (last year i reached the social security contribution limit for the first time in my life, actually decreasing my effective tax rate)

I didn't say that all taxes are progressive. FICA definitely is not, and I'm not a fan of FICA.

> their endowment is large enough to cover -- by very rough estimate -- about half of tuition in perpetuity; but not enough to refund their graduates.

I'm not sure what "refund their graduates" is supposed to mean — full refund of all tuition ever paid by every attendee? — but it sounds like much more than necessary to ameliorate the student debt problem for current debtors.

> Again with the false dichotomies.

i don't know how you dismiss this as a false dichotomy so quickly. i went on to present how i experience this dichotomy in my own life. we do not have limitless resources. therefore whenever we direct resources toward one thing, we are implicitly directing resources away from other pursuits.

if student debt cancellation literally did consume only trivial resources, then yes, this wouldn't be a dichotomy. however on the surface, it's $500B; when you factor in debt that was already in default like 3 years ago, it decreases a bit but still in the 11 figures. if you're an economist with a goal, you can swing the data to present changes in the overall economy in whichever direction you want; the (often unstated) error bounds on those grand predictions are often too massive to be useful.

> In fact many student loan debtors were in default or income-based forbearance before the 2020 pandemic suspension of payments.

what about this related talk around bankruptcy reform? this is far less expenditure, visibly so with just a glance: if somebody is literally unable to pay their debt, then the lost revenue due to canceling it is trivial. whatever forecasting you use to back this up touches far fewer variables/uncertainties than the broad economic forecasting people do around this debt forgiveness program. you just sum the probability that a person in default could recover in the timespan of their loan (for which there are hundreds of thousands of reference points) multiplied by the value of that loan. i could vet their model in an hour.

bankruptcy reform would help the people who have it the absolute worst, and it helps not just this year but every year for as long as such a policy stays in place.

> You say you support keeping tuition low, but that involves massive, permanent taxpayer subsidy, of the kind you don't seem to like.

you're right that i prefer directing subsidies into investments rather than servicing costs. i.e. subsidize developments which will lower the cost of tuition indefinitely, v.s. continuous payments which will never get smaller. examples of this are online/open courseware. the stuff out there today is good enough to replace the instruction portion of the first 2 years of my EE studies: a sizable chunk of overall tuition costs, if we made use of it. it used to be that access to lab equipment was reason enough to pay high tuition as a EE. but if i look at every piece of gear i used during my studies, i could recreate a suitable lab for < $2000 today, all COTS components. in theory, the reduced lab expenditure due to technological improvements should have reduced the actual cost of a EE degree during this time.

i'm not against non-investment subsidies altogether. for example, primary school where it's as much about socializing kids as it is academic, is naturally labor intensive: it's hard to imagine any way out of paying one instructor per every 20 (or 15, or whatever) kids, every year. some amount of this applies to higher-ed, but the floor is lower: there's more room us to decrease the recurring subsidies by shaping them such that they cause an equivalent education to be less expensive each year.

for the university case, tuition has risen in the face of the two deflationary technologies i showed above (which on their own, should have decreased the cost of an equivalent education). and hence it's not obvious that increasing tuition subsidies is a pragmatic approach to addressing the complaints i hear about our educational system. how much of these subsidies serve to encourage universities to scale their academic programs to support more students, v.s. how much serves to encourage universities to build cheaper, but non-beneficial programs (i.e. degrees which are cheap to provide, but don't lead to occupational paths) or even straight to the endowments?

i don't think blindly increasing tuition subsidies is a great way to better our situation. at least, the mood over the last decade is that this hasn't helped. i'm hopeful of income-share agreements. the public perception of higher education at this point is that people expect it to lead to good careers, and students are upset when this hasn't been the case. conditioning the university's revenue upon the quality of the career they enable for a student is one way to encourage this outcome. the federal loan ISA option doesn't actually do this: universities get the same revenue regardless of how better off the student is. make the ISAs an agreement between the student and the university. if it's a 10% ISA, the federal government could offer to cover half of that for the student, effectively lower the burden on the student to 5% of their income. if we're only recovering half of the loan payments today, this is effectively the same cost to the federal government, but better aligned so that the university actually produces good outcomes for the student (these figures are made-up: adjust the numbers as appropriate before doing this in practice).

>> their endowment is large enough to cover -- by very rough estimate -- about half of tuition in perpetuity; but not enough to refund their graduates.

> I'm not sure what "refund their graduates" is supposed to mean — full refund of all tuition ever paid by every attendee? — but it sounds like much more than necessary to ameliorate the student debt problem for current debtors.

the point here is that the endowments aren't large enough to both make higher-ed free to future students and compensate previous students. there's necessarily a trade-off between the two.

Taking any two arbitrarily chosen things in life, such as student loans and mosquito nets, and making us choose is a false dichotomy. We could have both. It's true that we can't have everything, "we do not have limitless resources" as you say, but there's no inherent reason why we couldn't have both of those two arbitrarily chosen things.

Moreover, the amount of resources availabe is also a choice. We could raise taxes (we cut taxes massively a couple years ago). We could reduce or eliminate tax deductions. And of course we could reduce spending in other areas to compensate. To choose one example arbitrarily, the US spends vastly more on military and police than any other country in the world.

> what about this related talk around bankruptcy reform?

Yes, we should allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy. But that's not a solution to the problem, it's a last resort. Declaring bankruptcy sucks, and can wreck your credit, making you unable to make other important purchases. If declaring bankruptcy were that great, then everyone would just wildly accumulate debt and then write it off. Why wouldn't you?

The purpose of student loan forgiveness is to take a huge burden off the debtors. But bankruptcy is itself a burden. So you're just replacing one burden with another. Sometimes necessary, but still bad.

The only effective difference between student loan forgiveness and student loan discharge in bankruptcy is that in the latter case, you're making life more difficult for the debtor. In either case, the loan holder doesn't get their money back.

> primary school where it's as much about socializing kids as it is academic

So is college. Arguably, who you meet at college is more important than what you learn. This is why people want to go to highly prestigious schools, because you're surrounded by rich and powerful and influential people. Note that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates both dropped out of Harvard — they didn't even get an undergrad degree!

There's not much evidence that what students learn in the classroom at Harvard is significantly different than what they learn at any other school. Math is math, science is science, literature is literature, etc. The point is to go to Harvard, to be at Harvard, and to have Harvard on your résumé. It's mostly social. The exclusivity is the point.

> for the university case, tuition has risen in the face of the two deflationary technologies i showed above (which on their own, should have decreased the cost of an equivalent education).

One thing you didn't mention though is decreasing government funding for colleges, at both the state and federal level. It's not the case and never been the case that tuition covers all operating costs.

> endowments aren't large enough to both make higher-ed free to future students and compensate previous students

You still haven't explained what "compensate previous students" means.

My feeling is that making higher-ed free to future students in perpetuity is the much more expensive proposition than forgiving some debt to former students, so if there's enough money for the former, it's unclear why there's not enough for the latter.

yes, we can apportion resources from one area of society for another. this doesn't create new resources: it moves them. instead of me donating 5% of my paycheck to my favored cause, that spending power is erased by the resources which were redirected to another cause (this is the point of me sharing that personal example earlier).

> The only effective difference between student loan forgiveness and student loan discharge in bankruptcy is that in the latter case, you're making life more difficult for the debtor.

not all whose debt was forgiven in this act were in default or incapable of repaying. otherwise, agreed.

> There's not much evidence that what students learn in the classroom at Harvard is significantly different than what they learn at any other school. Math is math, science is science, literature is literature, etc. The point is to go to Harvard, to be at Harvard, and to have Harvard on your résumé. It's mostly social. The exclusivity is the point.

what's constructive about subsidizing an exclusive-by-design system? i don't want to subsidize anything which is fixed-sum. subsidized schooling makes sense to the degree that the subsidy enriches society (loaded term but e.g. more freedom/ability to pursue the things which enrich a life and the lives around you). university as job training is the crude/direct way this happens; learning skills/knowledge relevant to any participation in society achieves this (e.g. communication, collaboration, organization skills); acquiring wisdom does this, in a cloudy manner difficult to measure. making social connections can do this, but if exclusivity is important to that then subsidies can't improve that, and if exclusivity is unimportant then we have loads of cheaper ways in which to congregate and make these connections. my state already offers effectively free community college: i assumed the depth/breadth of the curriculum were insufficient compared to more expensive universities, but if this turned out to be either false or irrelevant then i would claim that existing subsidies to higher-ed are already sufficient (at least in my state; i don't know about the rest of the country).

> My feeling is that making higher-ed free to future students in perpetuity is the much more expensive proposition than forgiving some debt to former students, so if there's enough money for the former, it's unclear why there's not enough for the latter.

without doing the former, the latter has to be done every 4 years (and if forgiving loans today causes future students to take on greater amounts of unrepayable loans, then this gets more expensive every time we do it). it's the "why not both" question again: if we had the resources for both, sure (or, refining this after earlier points of discussion, "if we could do both for a reasonable cost"). if we don't, then it's a question of what proportion we allocate toward improving the long future v.s. patching the narrow present. i simply put more value on an expenditure which can benefit N*M future students v.s. one which benefits only M present (or past) individuals at an equivalent cost. especially if improving things for the M present individuals has a real risk of making the situation worse for N*M future students.

Yet another false dichotomy. Is there a reason you can't continue to donate the same amount of money to your favored cause even if your taxes were raised? You already said that you made more than $142,800 last year (the social security contribution limit), and it appears from your profile that you're still in your 20s, all of which suggests that you're doing better financially than most people.

Let me go back and disagree with something you said earlier:

> inflation correlated to public/deficit spending led me to cut my own charitable donations.

Current inflation is mainly due to: 1) Supply chain problems caused by the pandemic 2) Supply chain problems caused by the Ukraine war 3) Corporate profiteering under the cover of 1 and 2.

It's truly bizarre that people think pandemic relief funds are the cause of inflation when pandemic relief funds were only a partial replacement for the money that was already moving in the economy before the pandemic hit.

Anyway, returning to charity, there are multiple problems with relying on uncoordinated charity rather than concerted government spending. First is that there's never enough charity if it's voluntary. My favorite thing as a developer is when people suggest that I should make my software open source and free and take donations. That would be the fastest way to homelessness! At which point I would need even more donations.

Another problem is that people tend to want their small individual amount of charity to go to the "worthiest" cause (as they perceive it). The result is that certain "sexy" charities are oversubscribed, while other important societal problems get ignored.

> what's constructive about subsidizing an exclusive-by-design system?

Nothing. But tell that to employers who require or favor college degrees from prestigious schools.

Even if we abolished the whole university system, though, the existing student loan debt problem would remain.

> if forgiving loans today causes future students to take on greater amounts of unrepayable loans

It's worth noting that the biggest supporters of student loan debt forgiveness also tend to be the biggest supporters of publicly subsidized college. The opposite tends to be true of the biggest opponents of student loan debt forgiveness. So I'm not very sympathetic to complaints that forgiving student loans would raise college costs, because the proposed alternative seems to be: do nothing whatsoever about the problem.

Everyone complaining about debt forgiveness now, are they calling for their elected representatives to do something about college costs? Where have these people been before the forgiveness debate?

The very reason we need debt forgiveness now is that we've ignored the college cost problem for so long. So I don't want to hear "no forgiveness without comprehensive reform", because the refusal to do comprehensive reform is the source of the whole debt problem.

> i simply put more value on an expenditure which can benefit N*M future students v.s. one which benefits only M present (or past) individuals at an equivalent cost

N, M, N times M, there are all empty hand-waving. You still haven't said what you meant in specific terms by "compensate previous students", and thus it's impossible to estimate the costs or claim that it's too expensive.

i can donate the same amount as before if i decrease the rate at which i'm saving for a house. this tradeoff exists, will always exist, and is influenced by outside forces (taxes, inflation). that's the point.

> Current inflation is mainly due to: [...]

which is distinct from saying that state spending does not contribute to inflation.

the rest of your points... i could respond but i don't see any path to resolving our disagreements. from my perspective you seem unwilling to admit an environment where distributing resources toward one purpose necessarily means redistributing them away from some other purpose, whereas i'm solidly convinced we don't live in the post-scarcity society. you suggest that individuals aren't to be trusted to distribute funds toward socially-good destinations (charity), yet i see a single individual bypassing the peoples' elected congressional representatives and doing just that.

i expect you would dispute this characterization (as someone who shares a democracy with you, i would hope you dispute it), and that i would dispute your characterization of my views, and that we would get bogged down there just as we are here. i have no reason to doubt your intentions, but there seems to be a large gulf between us and i'm getting the feeling this medium is ill-suited to the task. but it's good for other things, so please enjoy this photo of a very special cat as my parting gift instead: https://uninsane.org/share/captain_the_cat_in_a_box.jpeg

Of course. However, note that people with large student loan debts are also facing a tradeoff between paying for student loans and other things in life. In some cases, student loans can be like a mortgage. And many of the debtors are making less money than you (the current plan limits forgiveness to individuals making <$125K, and the claim is that ~90% of the beneficiaries make <$75K). The less money someone makes, the less able they are to successfully handle financial tradeoffs.

> from my perspective you seem unwilling to admit an environment where distributing resources toward one purpose necessarily means redistributing them away from some other purpose

This is not true. I've already suggested cutting spending on the military and police and raising taxes on the wealthy as two possibilities for redistributing funds.