(no subject)
I've come to really hate doing the work of Economics, due in no small part to the fact that I'm bad at it. Still, I have a more than grudging respect for it, and for its practitioners. Why? Because Econ. makes you think differently.
Example:
...the government isn't just in the business of subsidizing student loans as a means of lifting up poor people, it's in the business of subsidizing student loans because otherwise there wouldn't be much of a market for them. As we lack indentured servitude (a good thing), and there's no physical asset associated with education (a mortgage lender can take your house if you default, a student loan broker can't appropriate your brain), student loans aren't backed by anything.
To the extent that investment in education has decent rates of return, but credit constraints due to a lack of a well-functioning market for student loans prevent people from making those investments, there will be much less education than is efficient.
...Perhaps it's simply a fault in my brain, but things like that would never occur to me. Luckily, they don't have to, because a long time ago someone thought to create a mechanism by which words displayed on a computer screen could be made to reference other text, existing elsewhere on the internet. Thanks to HTML...I don't even need to try and summarize the above.
Now that's progress.
Example:
...the government isn't just in the business of subsidizing student loans as a means of lifting up poor people, it's in the business of subsidizing student loans because otherwise there wouldn't be much of a market for them. As we lack indentured servitude (a good thing), and there's no physical asset associated with education (a mortgage lender can take your house if you default, a student loan broker can't appropriate your brain), student loans aren't backed by anything.
To the extent that investment in education has decent rates of return, but credit constraints due to a lack of a well-functioning market for student loans prevent people from making those investments, there will be much less education than is efficient.
...Perhaps it's simply a fault in my brain, but things like that would never occur to me. Luckily, they don't have to, because a long time ago someone thought to create a mechanism by which words displayed on a computer screen could be made to reference other text, existing elsewhere on the internet. Thanks to HTML...I don't even need to try and summarize the above.
Now that's progress.