Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…This could include making them cosign the loan for student loans that they had to pay out of their endowments, right? Right. Again, that's one that's just so easy to admit to, demagogue, and say, “Oh, so what about this poor student who couldn't do it? Now no school wants to accept him because they don't want to be responsible for it.” If you go and read Lyndon Johnson's original speech in favor of student loans, it just takes the social desirability bias dial and turns it up to the absolute deafening maximum. I can't remember Lyndon Johnson's accent, but let's give him this accent. “I believe that in America, no student should ever be denied full access to the maximum opportunities of education merely because they were born in a family that was too poor to afford it. There is no price too high, no sacrifice too great.” Oh, God. That's the kind of weaponized nuclear rhetoric that politicians will deploy to defend this stuff. Yeah, it's really what I'm up against. That stuff that is good doesn't sound good. I was turning Lyndon Johnson into Bill Clinton. I just realized they're the same Texan–– Yeah, I might be giving that speech from the bathroom every day, I don't even know if you’ve heard the story [laughs]. Why do you think young people are getting more anxious and have a higher incidence of neuroticism overall?…

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