A lot of you really enjoyed my recent piece “The Great Debate Over Student Loan Forgiveness”, but there was something important I didn’t address that kept coming up. Over the last couple of days, as I began to lose faith in humanity due to selfishness and a lack of helping one another, I decided I wanted to find out what Ayn Rand and objectivism were all about. So, as I read Ayn Rand’s book The Virtue of Selfishness, I kept thinking about this weak argument that kept coming up when it came to canceling student loan debt, so let’s discuss how this is yet another massive failure of capitalism. While I think it’s possible for capitalism to work, our current system went way off the rails.
So, when talking about student loan debt, what was the weak argument that kept coming up?
Well, in response to the above tweet, my Substack piece, and some other comments I’ve made, I kept seeing the same response over and over again.
People kept saying things like, “Well, that’s your girlfriend and your mom’s dumb decision to go into those fields when they don’t pay well.” When I read comments like that, I wish I could turn into a cartoon just so I could drop my jaw to the floor in disbelief. When I continued to see this terrible argument, I just kept thinking how our capitalist system has really brainwashed people into complete irrationality.
Before we get started, I want to remind you about something I wrote in my last piece:
But he does bring up an interesting point, which some others echoed, and that’s the choice my mom and girlfriend made. Trust me, I’m 100% in agreement that our choices result in some of our outcomes. In fact, my favorite quote from the AA Big Book says this:
“…we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.”
This quote changed my life and taught me to take personal responsibility for my choices. When working in treatment or working with newly sober people, I tell them to tattoo this quote on their forehead to remember that we often cause our own problems.
Trust me when I say that I’m all about taking responsibility for our choices, but thank God we have people on this planet who aren’t completely motivated by money, status, and dumb things they can buy.
One of my good friends is a teacher, and I actually met her when we used to work together and she was in college pursuing her teaching degree. I have great admiration for teachers, and that’s all because of my grandma. Not only was my grandma the most important person in my life, but she was a special education teacher for over 30 years. My grandma not only took a low-paying job, but she actually chose to take an even more difficult route by working with children with special needs. So, whenever I meet a teacher or wants to be a teacher, my hat goes off to them because we treat teachers like garbage in this country.
When you sign up for a teacher, especially here in Las Vegas, you know you’re going to have terrible pay. Aside from the terrible pay, you’re going to have an overcrowded classroom if you work at most public schools in this district. And since you have overcrowded classrooms, you can’t provide children with individualized attention, and that sucks because a lot of your job depends on the children performing well.
My friend worked full-time while getting her teaching degree, and she’s a little white rockabilly girl who had a challenging childhood. Once she got her degree, she made the choice to take a job at a high school in a lower-class community where most students are African American or Latino. Going into it, she knew that as a little white girl, it might be challenging for her to connect to these students, but she welcomed the challenge and took the job even though some schools in much better parts of town with rich kids offered her a position.
Well, during her first year of teaching, we were roommates, and she had a lot of great days but also a lot of bad days. One day, after complaining about the job and how little it paid, I stopped her and asked, “Did you think being a teacher paid a lot of money?” I didn’t mean to be a dick, but as someone who is big on personal responsibility and am the type of friend who practices honesty, I wanted to point that out to her. And when I asked, she said, “Of course not!”. I then asked, “So, why did you get into teaching?” She then remembered that she didn’t get into this for the money and she got into it because she wants to help kids thrive and see that if they work hard, possibilities will open up.
And that’s the type of shit I love.
People like my friend and grandma became teachers to make this world a better place despite the lack of money in that field. My girlfriend is becoming a social worker for similar reasons. So, whenever I see people say, “Well, that’s their fault for doing that,” all I can think is, “What if everyone thought that way?”
This is where self-interest and the tragedy of the commons come in.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tragedy of the commons, I’ll break it down right quick. I got really into moral psychology and evolutionary psychology and this is a problem of economics that’s often discussed. It really highlights the issue with self-interest, and there are a lot of great conversations about morality and ethics that come from it.
So, imagine there’s a giant field, and a bunch of farmers have animals that graze in that field. If the farmers want to make money, they need to have animals that are fed. Well, since this is a community field, the farmers get together and agree that each farmer has an equal amount of the field where their animals can graze. And for the sake of this thought experiment, we’ll say all the farmers have the exact same number of animals. As long as all of the farmers uphold their agreement, everyone is fine and makes decent money.
Well, imagine one day, one of the farmer thinks, “If I let my animals graze a little bit more, I can make some more money. It’ll be just a little bit more, so that shouldn’t hurt anyone else too much, and I can buy a sweet new tractor.” He goes ahead and widens his patch of the field a bit for some more grazing.
Not long after, another farmer gets the same idea and does that too. Meanwhile, there’s another farmer who isn’t dumb and notices these two farmers are doing this, and he thinks, “Screw that, I’m going to do it too so I can make some more cash.”
By now, you can probably see where this is going. Due to self-interest and not operating for the good of the group, people are going to gain more and people are going to lose more. It’d be great to think, “Hey, that’s just smart business” when considering the self-interested farmers, but we’re neglecting other aspects of human nature. You’re going to have some farmers who can no longer make a living, and their families will suffer. Then, you have other farmers with anger issues, and they might walk over and shoot one of those self-interested farmers for being an asshole who broke the agreement.
The next thing you know, we have a hot mess. And this is the tragedy of the commons.
What’s this have to do with college and student loan debt? If everyone only chose jobs that paid well, we’d quickly run into the tragedy of the commons and have a worse society than we already have. Think about it for just two seconds. If every person who wanted to be a teacher or social worker changed their mind when they realized the money isn’t good, what would this world look like?
I like to have conversations with people to better understand their thinking, and this one guy was saying, “If your girlfriend wants to help people, she could have become a nurse and started at $70,000 a year.” True, she’d be helping people, but we still run into the same issue. It’s a zero-sum game. If she became a nurse, we’d have one less social worker. A teacher could become an attorney, but then we’d have one less teacher.
Then, there’s another opinion people have that runs into the exact same problem. These people say, “Well, if she’s getting a master’s in social work, she can open a private practice and charge $100 - $200 an hour.” This is also true, but like my teacher friend, my girlfriend is going into social work to help lower-income and homeless people and children. Right now, she’s doing her practicum at an inpatient psych facility, and a lot of their clients are poor or homeless. If she went the high-paying private practice route, we have the same zero-sum game where there’s one less person helping those who don’t make that much money.
So, what’s the problem? Capitalism.
Again, capitalism can be good, but our system has become so screwed up, it’s hard to see how we can fix it. One of the primary aspects of capitalism is that you’re paid for the value you bring. The value you bring is completely based on the structure of the society you live in. In the current society we live in, the things we value do not benefit society as a whole. You can become a hedge fund manager, an investment banker, or own a company that destroys the environment and make bank. Why? Because we, as a society, have said that these are the most valuable careers.
But I’d be willing to bet that most of the people making the comments about choosing low-paying college paths aren’t millionaires or billionaires. Statistically, they’re probably upper-middle class at best, but they’re more than likely lower-middle class. So, what’s going on?
Not to get all hippy on you, but I have to drop some truth. In a capitalist society like ours, we’re brainwashed from a young age that things will make you happy. If you buy things for that fleeting hit of dopamine, you’ll be happy. And if you buy things that impress others, you’ll be even happier. But most of all, if you buy things that show you’re of higher status than other people, you’ll be the happiest.
We’re sold the lie that money and things will make us happy, which leads to a nation of a lot of people running on self-interest. Therefore, they think something must be cognitively wrong with people who are willing to make a financial sacrifice in their careers. But the idea that money and things will make us happy is a total illusion. When I taught this to my clients while working at a rehab, I just regularly reminded them of all of the celebrity suicides and drug overdoses. If money and things guaranteed happiness, we’d have no miserable rich people. Since we do have miserable rich people, we need to take a step back and see if our values got screwed up somewhere in life.
So yes, there are people who make the conscious decision to rack up student loan debt for careers that don’t pay well, and we should thank them on a daily basis for their sacrifice. They managed to break the spell of capitalist self-interest and are trying to counter-balance the tragedy of the commons. If we want any hope for our country to reach its full potential, we need to incentivize people to get into careers that better our society. Capitalism can work, and it’ll start working when the richest people are the ones doing the most good.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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