Student loans are a boon to everyone, the best risk reward decisipn most people will make in their life for one. The financing is cheap, the education is high return (Im a double humanities major from an Ivy the same year as Anya) and extremely low risk. Debt is not a bad thing, especially if you use it to finance a substantial increase in your earning power. The woe is me act is absurdism in writing.

All the debt she lists as bad have been positives for this country and its citizens. Yes, there are horror stories but embracing rather than villifying debt has a whole made this country and world substantially better off.

And the her policy recommendations will not effect what she would hope:

“Responsibility goes both ways — it is also the responsibility of lenders to provide complete, non-deceptive information to borrowers and to try to ensure to the best of their ability that they don’t lend more money than people will be able to pay back. ”

To the extent borrowers are regulated to “not lend more money than people will be able to pay back”, the result will be that people on the margins won’t be able to secure fund their purchases whether it be educations or houses. It won’t affect the upper-middle class, it won’t affect Yalies or kids who go to other Ivies. The paternal regulation she proscribes will make these things unreachable for people on the margin.

This all applies to calls against sub-prime mortgages as well. People act like somehow banks have been “evil” by offering people mortgages who previosuly could not secure financing to buy a house. Turn the clock ahead a few years, and now it’s clear that these mortgages were made at lower rates than they should have been and the lender side of the equation (assets owned by CDOs, etc) are experiencing huge losses because of it. The borrowers largely BENEFITTED, yet somehow now they are victims.

Compare this to the third world, where banking is a non-entity for their middle class or lower and financing can only come from loan sharks at truly absurd rates. Or not at all.

And more specific to what irks me about Anya from Daniel Gross’s “The It Sucks to be Me Generation” (http://www.slate.com/id/2134007/) column in 2006:

“In the press materials accompanying the book ["Generation Debt"], she notes that just after she finished the first draft, her boyfriend “proposed to me on a tiny, idyllic island off the coast of Sweden.” She continues: “As I write this, boxes of china and flatware, engagement gifts, sit in our living room waiting to go into storage because they just won’t fit in our insanely narrow galley kitchen. We spent a whole afternoon exchanging the inevitable silver candlesticks and crystal vases, heavy artifacts of an iconic married life that still seems to have nothing to do with ours.” The inevitable silver candlesticks? Too much flatware to fit in the kitchen? We should all have such problems.”

“I fail to understand why it’s OK for her to rail against the Boomers and other older Americans the way she does. This is mean-spirited and really turned me off. (I am 37, by the way.) The worst example of this is on page 159, where she says that giving money to older people is investing in the past, while giving money to younger people is investing in the future.

I find this attitude to be repulsive. So everything that older Americans have done for this country – from fighting in wars to working for civil and women’s rights to just plain raising us – all of this is erased when they are old and a “burden?” To be incendiary, this reminds me of the famous Nazi propaganda piece where the tall, young, strong Aryan was bent under the weight of the “defectives” he unfairly had to support. I see in this book and in some of the reviews here the theme that older people are burdening the country.”

Laura, I’m trying to provide each of our experts a chance to show off their accomplishments — because each really has been very successful in her own way. Very soon we’ll feature a round table discussion with several of the panelists that will get into more of the nitty-gritty, so hopefully that will really satisfy your guys’ hunger! =)

Kate, I’d be interested in seeing your sources on what occupations women pick over men. What is the earnings data on those occupations?