Student Loan Forgiveness and Unicorn Futures

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to outdo each other on student loan forgiveness schemes. It is good to see. People took on the debt on the promise of well-paying jobs. Then most of the well-paying jobs went away. So, declare bankruptcy, heh? But conservatives outlawed that. Somehow, after taking away education grants, raising the price of education, making it difficult to get any job without a degree, cutting pay across the board, being in deep debt is still the fault of students. As if that is not enough we have work crying to be done. Our infrastructure is crumbling, we need to build a carbon-free economy, and conservatives do not want to pay.

So what it to be done? Let us look at a simpler scheme: allow student loan debt to be dissolved in bankruptcy, and return bankruptcy law to its pre-2005 state, so that it allows a dignified fresh start to the bankrupt. But the banks will fight this tooth and nail. So why, even, are we talking about something much more radical? It is like debating unicorn futures.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The General Intelligence of Robots

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.
Read more

A Grand Unified Theory of Bad New Economy Firms

The wildly successful internet economy firms mostly operate by evading laws. New technology which has allowed firms to move their business to less-regulated jurisdictions and a generation of deregulation and favorable court decisions have allowed these firms to be bad places to work and bad places to do business with. Here’s a catalog of some of their abuses: Evasion of local laws through national operations . Amazon notoriously picks jurisdictions with lax labor laws for its warehouses. Uber simply ignores local laws until penalized. When penalized, they initiate political campaigns to get the laws overridden at the state level. Extortionate business practices . Doordash infamously underpays its workers. Grubhub notoriously overcharges restaurants . Uber has the resurrected long-illegal practice of raising taxi rates when demand is highest. Monopolistic practices . Enforcement in this
Read more

Richard M. Stallman and the Failure of the Free Software Foundation

(Note: since the writing of the following, the Free Software Foundation has tweeted: “The FSF board unanimously condemns misogyny, racism, and other bigotry as well as defamation, intimidation, and unfair attacks on free thought and speech.” They are rejecting the criticism of Stallman as unfair and, in so doing, they aligned themselves with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They have put themselves beyond redemption and any fair hearing for their ideas. No-one wants to listen to the logic-chopping of rape apologists – it is as bad as listening to Southern racists excusing slavery.)   This is outside of my usual ambit, and it is about cooperative software development rather than market economics, but it seems to belong here more than anywhere. People who follow free and open source software by now know that alleged harasser and rape apologist Richard M. Stallman has, by a secret process, been restored to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman has lon
Read more