While I'm not familiar with Blythe, I'd address your comment:
I certainly don't think it _helps_. Take the Keynes quote from the paper, that given an uncertain financial future people wanted "A Change", and a population that took out substantial debt and didn't leverage this effectively may be looking at a very uncertain financial future of their own.
There's also a certain similarity I can see in the psychological impact of inflation, high taxes, and high debt loads without high earning potential, in that they by their nature are difficult to overcome (and in some cases impossible to), and here I'd cite the many prior HN discussions on "the cost of being poor" to throw more wood on that fire.
Finally, they observed in the paper that much of the nazi voting came from those who had the most to loose from austerity, so the fact that student debt is tied to upper middle class doesn't seem to necessarily contradict that possibility either, even if it's within the self-selecting group of those who imposed that debt on themselves in the first place.
It's limiting who can even enter college. Blyth specifically recommends "Free College Tuition". I (perhaps unwisely) mentioned the milder goal only addressing current student debt with the goal of avoiding being dismissed as "marxism".
I strongly recommend listening to Blyth's actual explanation (in this or his other talks & publications), not my poor-quality summary.
The idea that the solution to the core problem of toxic populism just happens to be the policy prescriptions of the Bernie Sanders campaign (I say this as a Democrat!) seems like a bit of a just-so story.
Well sure, it seems dubious if you frame it chronologically like that but that's not necessarily how it happened. "The idea that the solution to the core problem of X just happens to be the prescriptions of Y" is exactly the case whenever Y is purposefully and intentionally constructed to solve the problem X.
Who's to say social democratic policies (i.e. Sanders, FDR) don't usually arise in response to the toxic populism that austerity creates because they (anti-austerity) are the natural cure? Isn't that the story behind the new deal?
Is it so hard to believe that creating an entire generation of people who will have negative net worth until they are 40 fosters resentment?
That's a tautological argument. No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt; they simply disagree about the best way to avoid that outcome.
I don't doubt that people who believe in single payer and subsidized tuition do so because they think it's the best way to keep generations out of debt. It would be weird for them to think otherwise.
What I'm doubting is that they can evoke public policy outcomes from the 1930s as a natural experiment proving that those are the best policy interventions. I think that argument assumes a whole variety of facts not really in evidence.
>No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt
I agree, but I don't agree that even a majority of participants in public policy debates are acting in good faith. I think it's possible, but given the results and empirical evidence we have to the contrary you should provide some evidence or argument to back up this extremely controversial claim.
I don't think they actively wish to push generations into debt like mustache-twirling cartoon villains, but I do think they are not particularly concerned with this side effect of their other policy goals which are essentially a massive transfer of wealth and power to the private sector, like, e.g. privatization of the loan industry and education.
>I think that argument assumes a whole variety of facts not really in evidence.
The original argument was made by Blyth, who is a serious academic, not me, and you haven't made any attempt to engage with him at all. The crux of the argument is that "anti-austerity is the cure to the ills of austerity" which is honestly nearly tautological because of its obvious correctness, not because of a flaw in its reasoning. It's natural to look back at similar historical situations, like a gilded age of massive inequality and the destruction of working class power preceding a depression. The only real difference between then and now is that we've chosen to call our depression a recession, and pretended there was a recovery from it instead of creating one.
> No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt; they simply disagree about the best way to avoid that outcome.
I feel there is more disagreement about the outcome itself.
Maybe no one could wish upon others financial debt, but a lot of people question why they'd need to help others achieve financial stability.
The idea that we need to actively find ways to raise the minimum standards of living and create a financial baseline seem to me like leaning on socialist ideas.
The other side can claim that there are winners and there are losers, and that's exactly how things should be. Reward the winners, and motivate the losers to work harder, simply make sure they are allowed to compete.
It would cost a lot less to just have companies take a little more risk when hiring.
(There's nothing wrong with making higher education cost less for people that want to do it, but plenty of people are just seeking a credential they see as necessary for access to certain jobs, jobs which often don't need much of the higher education they purport to require)
The upper middle class can often avoid the worst of the debt thanks to money from mommy and daddy.
Of the ~35% of Americans who get college degrees and the debt that goes with it, the ones who end up in the most debt will overwhelmingly be those whose parents didn't save up a college fund for them - i.e. kids who came from working and lower middle classes.
I certainly don't think it _helps_. Take the Keynes quote from the paper, that given an uncertain financial future people wanted "A Change", and a population that took out substantial debt and didn't leverage this effectively may be looking at a very uncertain financial future of their own.
There's also a certain similarity I can see in the psychological impact of inflation, high taxes, and high debt loads without high earning potential, in that they by their nature are difficult to overcome (and in some cases impossible to), and here I'd cite the many prior HN discussions on "the cost of being poor" to throw more wood on that fire.
Finally, they observed in the paper that much of the nazi voting came from those who had the most to loose from austerity, so the fact that student debt is tied to upper middle class doesn't seem to necessarily contradict that possibility either, even if it's within the self-selecting group of those who imposed that debt on themselves in the first place.