Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there\u2019s 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\u2019s happened to our society. We\u2019re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.\n
David Graeber (via azspot)
\n\n\nSeen 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\u2019t?\u00a0
\nFirstly, the comparison between $50,000 in debt and enslavement is unambiguously horrible. Also, the \u201cmost energetic, creative, joyous\u201d people aren\u2019t 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\u2019t really correlate with energeticness or creativeness or joyousness. And finally, music and culture and plenty of other kinds of innovation don\u2019t need any kind of formal post-secondary credential and in fact many of the most innovative members of our society weren\u2019t able to access post-secondary education.
\nDon\u2019t 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\u2019t get to go to college, you know? Like, I\u2019d suggest we can simultaneously say \u201cwe\u2019re relatively fortunate\u201d and \u201cthe system in which we\u2019ve been fortunate enough to participate has huge problems\u201d.
\n(via jakke)
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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.
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