Unfortunately it would require knowledge of the future. My concern with the policy is that I believe it creates perverse incentives that encourage a continuing spiral of more costly higher education, resulting in more debt, and unpredictable periodic political battles over "one-time" forgiveness.
If you could come back from the future and say "that didn't happen, instead it gave college graduates the breathing room they needed to become politically engaged and they successfully pushed for permanent solutions to the problem of increasing costs and debt", then I'd be happy to take the L!
Or perhaps if you could find an analogous country where a one-time blanket forgiveness led to more foundational improvements to the financing of higher education in that country, that would help alleviate my concerns.
But barring that analogous country that already did this (which I don't think exists because, as you've noted, our current system is weird and different than how it works elsewhere), I don't think there's a quantitative answer to this question, because that's just not where my concern lies.
Ok so here's the belief I think you must be saying you believe the opposite of:
> I believe it creates perverse incentives that encourage a continuing spiral of more costly higher education, resulting in more debt, and unpredictable periodic political battles over "one-time" forgiveness.
So you believe that forgiving loans will instead create good incentives that lead to lower costs for higher education. Can you explain the mechanism by which you think that would happen? I've described how I predict people would behave, but I'm curious how you think it would shake out.
If you could come back from the future and say "that didn't happen, instead it gave college graduates the breathing room they needed to become politically engaged and they successfully pushed for permanent solutions to the problem of increasing costs and debt", then I'd be happy to take the L!
Or perhaps if you could find an analogous country where a one-time blanket forgiveness led to more foundational improvements to the financing of higher education in that country, that would help alleviate my concerns.
But barring that analogous country that already did this (which I don't think exists because, as you've noted, our current system is weird and different than how it works elsewhere), I don't think there's a quantitative answer to this question, because that's just not where my concern lies.