Ward on Words

Since the economy crashed in 2008, Brad Delong has periodically wondered how the small losses seen recently in the securitized mortgage market have added up to the worst recession since the Great Depression. He's got such a post over on his blog today. I am not an economist. But my big post-crisis question isn't how "a $2 trillion impulse in lost value of securitized mortgages has set in motion a financial accelerator that we do not understand at any deep level but that has led to ten times the total losses in financial wealth of the impulse." My big question is: when did we become so dependent on debt at every level of our economy - consumer, banking, government? In 2008, leverage became the only pillar of our economy that was left standing, apparently, until it, too, crashed. Brad Delong recognizes a key fact: "You need money to buy stuff. If you don't have money, you can't buy stuff--and so when you are short of money you cut back your spending...

Brad Delong, economics professor, blogger , expert on money stuff, has a sidebar on his blog noting that he's signed up for a speaker's bureau because "the Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money." Which makes it a bit odd that he's got a guest post on the Berkely Blog called Is It Fair for Education to Be Cheap ? A man now on the hustings to raise money for college is well aware that "cheap" and "college" are not a likely pair. What he's referring to is the subsidized higher education one can acquire at a public university. In my state, the in-state tuition is about $22,000 a year, which makes the cost of a four-year degree close to six figures when it's all said and done. That's not "cheap" education. Or if it is, I'd like to know how a family that makes today's average income of $50K can afford to send multiple children off to school an...