The US startup is disappearing
I paid out $100,000 to pay off my wife & my own student loan debt early. Student loan debt can not be discharged by bankruptcy; it's always waiting for you.<p>This implies several things immediately:<p>- You have to take a job which can make payments on the debt.<p>- You have to choose stable jobs which will not suddenly fold under you.<p>There's also a somewhat hard to define aspect to the problem where you have to ensure that your local system is fiscally stable.<p>Anyway, non-1% Americans graduated from college not taking risks in their first 10 years out? <i>Totally</i> predictable, just from the debt perspective.<p>Then, at 32, 34, a lot of people are married and/or have a kid on the way. Welp, there's your high levels of downside again.<p>Add in to all this the fact that housing prices are effectively tethered to the availability of cash provided to the "highly paid" market (inequality increases)....<p>... so if your startup fails, you'll lose your place to live, and remote jobs are very rare, so you're in trouble in the big city with now-unaffordable costs of living.<p>the solution, in part, has a simple policy component: declare jubilee on all federally-originated student debt; free college for all students who maintain adequate gpas, no more federal loans. impose cost controls on universities that take federal money.<p>that effectively derisks an entire generation and opens up new options.<p>housing costs are less directly tractable and more politically problematic: the effective solution is to federally strip single family zoning from all land, and mandating density minimums and other supply-increasing zoning. (I <i>assure</i> you, the housing market is an interstate commerce system. :) ). But that only staunches the wound, it doesn't bring down housing prices into line with the median American's income.<p>Wait, this is about <i>startups</i>? Ha! No. That's a third order consequence caused by increasing early-career & mid-career risk, which in turn is increased by the planning & zoning codes and governmental defunding of education.