Certainly in my childhood and young adult life there were a number of factors to my success or lack of it that had nothing to do with which school I attended. I think the main factors to my economic success was being taught to enjoy reading at a young age by my parents. I have always devoured information and through that have made a career without any qualifications.

The emotional/social success and general happiness I experience is a little harder to point to a source but certainly didn't come from the shit hole high school I attended. I generally attribute it to my parents teaching me what to value and growing up in an emotionally secure environment.

This security and parenting happened even though my parents fought each other constantly and divorced in my early teens. The were both dedicated parents who presented a consistent set of rules and values.

Of course I could just be on the further end of the bell curve?

>Certainly in my childhood and young adult life there were a number of factors to my success or lack of it that had nothing to do with which school I attended.

But would those factors be the same at a different school? I'm going to commit a minor sin and say a statistic without a citation; the average ACT score among teachers in Chicago was 19 a few years back.

You say you went to a shit hole high school, in which case you really _should_ have a sense of perspective on the whole thing. If your school was a shitty as you say, you must have been near the very, very top of your class (not in class rank but in overall success). That's a huge distribution of people who are _not you_, who went on to more desperate lives.

Money is just the messenger in the economy - it transmits information to you about what roles might or might not be valuable, and from you as to what goods and services you would like to consume. It's not hard to stay out of debt - you simply have to heed the message that money is transmitting to you.

Poverty is a wider question, and includes whether or not it is fair & just that some people have to make the sacrifices needed to stay out of debt. When I say that you can simply choose not to send your kids to college to avoid taking on crippling student loan debt, that is a 100% factually true statement. When you then say "But one shouldn't have to forgo an education to avoid going into debt", that's a normative statement. It's one that I'd probably even agree with you on, but it's a much broader conversation with no clear answers about how to fix it or even what the problem definition is.

The debate is actually about what informational tools people have available to them. This is demonstrated by your statement:

>It's not hard to stay out of debt - you simply have to heed the message that money is transmitting to you.

which is equivalently "It's not hard to stay out of debt if you're equipped with the attitudes that let you stay out of debt" which is tautological and therefore a non-statement. My point is that poverty _means_ being less likely to understand money.

My point is _not_ accurately summed up by "But one shouldn't have to forgo an education to avoid going into debt." I make no assertion about what a person _should_ do because that doesn't have anything to do with what they actually will do. I would prefer the phrasing "People _will_ choose a risk of debt in order to have their kids better educated" as that more accurately captures the situation. Not all of the people who put it all on the line to live in a better neighborhood ended up in debt. Some of them got lucky and did not have medical emergencies--for them, the risk paid off.

So your statement about whether or not schools are "overwhelmingly important" is true but irrelevant. Schools aren't overwhelmingly important, but they _are_ important. They improve the odds of success. Your personal success in a shit-hole school does not speak to the average of that school nor does it comment on whether or not it is sensible for a parent to risk additional debt for a better school.

That may be true in your situation, but when you have long-term obligations like a mortgage and kids in school, you're a bit less agile in your ability to respond to changing economic situations. If what you're suggesting is simply to not take on any long-term obligations that you don't absolutely know you can afford, that's a bit naive I think. For most people, being unable to work for a year will mean you either liquidate your life or you go into debt. Most people may not end up there, but according to your statement, everyone should live like they would.

a) Why is it that you won't do it?

b) The issue is that they're sacrificing the financial security of their kids by living on the edge and that is irresponsible if you're someone's guardian.

Imagine a company/government says we'll go into heavy debt because we want to give our shareholders/citizens a good shot - is that not irresponsible?

Those are two different questions.

When it comes to a company, the answer is very often Yes. The purpose of most companies (there are some exceptions) is to maximize profits using all ethical and legal means. If the expected payoff of the capital investment the loan would finance is greater than the interest of the loan, then taking it very often makes sense even if it would risk bankruptcy if something goes wrong.

When asking about the government, it matters a lot about what you think the purpose of government is, and that is a philosophical question I will leave alone for now.

I didn't think about that stuff until I had kids myself, so it is not that surprising, given your position, that you haven't thought of that.

It's not like the potential downside is living in the car. The potential downside is maybe being forced to rent in a worse area, and having trouble buying things on credit for a while.