{"id":11982,"date":"2013-07-09T12:24:38","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T16:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11982"},"modified":"2013-07-09T12:24:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T16:24:38","slug":"who-is-the-student-in-the-student-loan-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11982","title":{"rendered":"why young people do not form an interest group"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The recent increase in student loan rates is a significant injustice for people who hold student loans. But the politics of this issue is often presented misleadingly. It is treated as a generational question, much as a decrease in Social Security benefits would be a threat to seniors. There are two problems with that analysis: (1) most young people are not conventional college students or college graduates, and (2) many college students are not young.<\/p>\n<p>The National Journal&#8217;s Elahe Izadi has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationaljournal.com\/daily\/who-exactly-is-the-student-in-the-loan-rate-debate-20130708\">good piece making those points<\/a>. She also notes that the most severe student loan burden falls on older grads (age 30+). She quotes me on politicians&#8217; tendency to ignore issues that confront the <em>non<\/em>-college-bound youth. I say that working-class young people are \u201cnot really part of the political situation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>More generally, young people do not act like a political interest group because their circumstances and interests vary too much, and because their horizons extend beyond youth, which is a short phase. The fact that they do not act like an interest group is one reason they are easy to ignore in politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The recent increase in student loan rates is a significant injustice for people who hold student loans. But the politics of this issue is often presented misleadingly. It is treated as a generational question, much as a decrease in Social Security benefits would be a threat to seniors. There are two problems with that analysis: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11985,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11982\/revisions\/11985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}