- Thinkstock
- What it feels like to stop paying student loans (dramatization)
I don’t know whether Megan McArdle intended to pay Lee Siegel a compliment. Probably not. Siegel, a cultural critic who used to go to Columbia University, published an essay in the New York Times last week explaining why he blew off his student loans. Then McArdle wrote an essay for Bloomberg View—reprinted in the Tribune—marveling that Siegel “described his decision in the least sympathetic terms possible. He offered not one good reason that he couldn’t pay his student loans; the best he could do was to say he didn’t want to pay them.”
But a ringing “I chose life” isn’t enough to persuade McArdle or anyone else—including me—that you had a brush with death. Even so, I like Siegel’s argument for its coldness. It makes it stronger. We don’t march against the king behind the beggar we give alms to. “If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, ‘Enough,’” writes Siegel, “then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality.” That’s a call to arms, which is the wrong time to solicit pity.
