Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.

David Graeber (via azspot)

Seen this quote a couple times recently and with all due respect I feel super uncomfortable about it and am confused as to why other people don’t? 

Firstly, the comparison between $50,000 in debt and enslavement is unambiguously horrible. Also, the “most energetic, creative, joyous” people aren’t necessarily the ones who are getting into university, because the opportunity to get into university depends strongly on the quality of your secondary school and a maze of very specific cultural expectations and not having any dependants to take care of and these traits don’t really correlate with energeticness or creativeness or joyousness. And finally, music and culture and plenty of other kinds of innovation don’t need any kind of formal post-secondary credential and in fact many of the most innovative members of our society weren’t able to access post-secondary education.

Don’t get me wrong here - obviously high unsubsidized tuition and the resulting student debt is a horrible inefficient counterproductive system. But I think there are ways to make that point without shitting all over everyone who doesn’t get to go to college, you know? Like, I’d suggest we can simultaneously say “we’re relatively fortunate” and “the system in which we’ve been fortunate enough to participate has huge problems”.

(via jakke)

Threeish years’ worth of gross wages at unskilled labor is a pretty typical term of debt bondage, and has been for millennia. Chattel slavery isn’t the only kind of bondage, and sniffily dismissing other kinds by pointing to it and saying “look, it’s not that” is an asinine way of legitimating an unfree labor economy. And has been for millennia.