Thanks for the thoughtful comment. > People going into extreme debt for a shot at an OK life is a massive problem, and personally, I don't think its fair to ju

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. > People going into extreme debt for a shot at an OK life is a massive problem, and personally, I don't think its fair to just say "well you should have thought about that before." I agree, they do need to take some responsibility to think things through, but at the same point, we as a society need to leverage their intelligence and work ethic, and give them a path forward in life. We don't do that now for the majority of cases. But as you said, society _is_ giving them an opportunity to productively leverage their intelligence and work ethic, and your hypothetical person's answer is "but I don't wanna". I'm of the opinion (and have been for far longer than it's been so en vogue) that society is rich enough that we should be providing a robust resource floor like a UBI: having the resources to live with dignity shouldn't be contingent on one's economic productivity. But I scratch my head over claims like this that we should be contorting the economy to provide not just a resource floor, not just make-work, but _stimulating_ make-work in whatever field they desire, ignoring any question of whether the work provides value to society. Note that I'm not suggesting that the market is a perfect oracle for determining value to society. But govt action in these cases boils down to a principled expansion of the set of fields we consider to provide value to society, which has the effect of eg allowing people to apply their intelligence and work ethic to eg the arts. This is orthogonal to your general claim that we should be providing this path for whatever field people want.