A subset of graduates are (most notably those who went to for-profit colleges).

Both things can be true: 1) An overwhelming majority are not drowning in debt, 2) There are former students who are drowning in debt. An overwhelming majority is not "all" or even "substantially all".

Lumping "college" together is rather misleading because there are several categories of schools that may all grant 4 year "college degrees", but provide dramatically different opportunities, charge dramatically different tuitions, and provide very different educations.

1) For profit schools (i.e. University of Phoenix) are a substantial portion of "college" degrees. While some providers may very well provide some useful education, a lot of those degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on. They are mostly vehicles to vacuum student loan money from the government and provide as little as possible in return. For profit colleges are responsible for a disproportionally large share of student loan defaults and (I strongly suspect) a large share of underemployed college graduates. To many employers, such a school on your resume is worse than none at all.

2) State schools and less-competitive privates. These are the "middle class" option that tends to define what most of the public think of as "college." Tuitions are generally reasonable (in-state), but they can still be expensive once living expenses are included if you are a full-time student. Instruction quality and post-grad opportunities vary dramatically depending on major and the individual student.

3) Elite schools (Ivy+ types). The students at these institutions are playing a different game than the others. You can major in underwater basketweaving at Harvard and go on to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and make well into the six figures immediately after graduation. The prices are truly eye-popping, although they do offer generous need-based aid (a lot less "merit" aid than schools in the middle-class tier).

All three of these paths (they aren't totally rigid and there are schools falling somewhat between them) are so different that lumping them altogether is rather unhelpful. The sort of person deciding between going to college and becoming a welder probably isn't also weighing Yale vs. Stanford.

"For the overwhelming majority of graduates, the returns on going to college more than offset the cost of tuition. ". That's news to all the grads drowning in debt they'll never pay off."

Is it? If 20% of graduates are drowning debt they will never pay off, it could still be the case that the overwhelming majority see positive returns. But the statistics on defaulted student loans show a huge portion of the defaults come from students who never completed their degree (especially from for-profit schools).

""After factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20 percent since 2015, even before adjusting for inflation." What? Seriously"

You are going to need more than a "What? Seriously?" to contest this. Private schools in particular have hiked sticker prices to the moon but practice extreme price discrimination. It has become routine to offer a "scholarship" (i.e. discount) to the vast majority of accepted applicants to incentivize their attendance. It was around 2015 that most schools started to hit a breaking point in what they could charge. Yes, high income Ivy League students still pay sticker, but there were only so many families willing to pay $50k a year to a no-name private school. What happened is those no-name private school kept the $50k tuition on paper (maybe even raised it to $60k) but only actually charge a fraction of that to the vast majority of students.

"Many more things like that. And she never even addresses the issue of enrollment now being overwhelmingly female, with majors that are money losers in the job markets."

You attack the author for failing to provide support, but you have no support for this assertion that female students are less likely to enroll in lucrative majors. While fields like engineering may be male dominated, healthcare (also generally well-paying) tends to be female dominated. Even elementary school teaching (heavily female dominated) probably justifies the cost of college in most cases.

Basically, all of the monotheistic religions (and most religion period) claim special provenance from God. Every major religion has, at one time or another, been used to justify the political conquest of its founders/adherents. A Jew could have just as easily said "God did not send Jesus Christ to rewrite Judaism." In fact, Jesus was crucified in the bible precisely because the Jewish leadership viewed his teaching as apostacy (and more importantly, political rebellion from the authority of the priestly caste). When Jesus said "I come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill" the Pharisees heard "I am building a competing power base to the Jewish religious establishment." The pre-Abrahamic religions likewise considered Judaism apostacy (and a competing power base), and in fact much of the Old Testament is devoted to opposition (both political and theological) to since-defunct religious beliefs that believed themselves to be the one "true" religion.

Regardless of the context of the quote, the roughly 1,400 year history of Islam has shown that the vast majority of majority-Muslim countries have allowed freedom of religion within their jurisdictions. Christianity has a mixed record on freedom of religion. I don't blame Christianity for this so much as theocracy. Once a religion takes over the running of a state, to oppose the official religion is to oppose the state. Henry the VIII didn't start the Church of England because he had some deep theological objection to the Catholic Church. He wanted to kick out the Catholic Church to consolidate his political power. That political nature of a state-sponsored religion is why England was cast into religious and political turmoil after Henry VII's death. Theocracies like Iran are just the spiritual successors to that same dynamic.

There is still a lot of outsourcing. It's just that the power that be realized it's not a replacement for all grunt work, but a limited use tool. AI may turn out similar. We've only had a few years of mass AI adoption. Give it a few more and the dearth of juniors moving up the ranks will get more obvious, deadlines will slip, and the "AI will do everything" narrative will start to fade.

Well, there was a certain amount of accident. One big catalyst for the renaissance was cross-pollination of ideas between the Middle East and Europe stemming from the crusades. The rulers of the Middle East during the Middle Ages and pre renaissance were far more accepting of secular knowledge than in Christian Europe. That is why we use Arabic numerals today and not some system created in Europe. The fall of Constantinople also helped, which was a bit of historic accident caused in large part by the Crusaders (and the Vatican) being a disorganized mess during that period. The fall of Constantinople (and the Eastern Roman Empire) pushed a lot of Easterners West, who helped spread ideas from the East.

The reformation was an overthrow of the power of the Vatican, but it also became an overthrow of the very idea of church power itself. The Enlightenment, which produced liberalism as we know it, was only enabled by the freedom to push secular ideas apart from the church. That required not just eroding centralized religious authorities in the Vatican, but also religious authority more broadly. Early Enlightenment writers in the 17th century like Descartes had to write their secular philosophy in religious terms. But by the late 18th century, writers were allowed to be explicitly secular.

I think this is the third time in this thread I've had to correct someone who is using false "facts" to push a bigoted narrative.

The vast majority of majority Muslim countries allow freedom of religion. In fact, freedom of religion in Islam goes back all the way to Muhammed and is explicitly provided for in the Quran. "To you your religion, and to me mine" (Quran 109:6). The early Islamic states of the Middle Ages were far more tolerant of Jews and Christians than were Christian States in Europe during the same period. There were Christian communities operating freely during the Ottoman empire at the same time as the Spanish Inquisition.

It is true that theocracies like Iran and Afghanistan restrict freedom of religion, but these are a small minority of majority Muslim countries. Besides, Christianity also has a history of theocracies restricting freedom of religion. Even the Puritans of Massachusetts cracked down on freedom of religion, pushing out Catholics and other unfavored denominations. But go to Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, the UAE, Morocco, and any number of majority-Muslim countries (collectively making up more than 90% of the world's Muslim population) and you will find freedom of religion. Nobody blinks an eye at a Christmas celebration in Istanbul. The idea of protesting a Christmas tree would be unthinkable in most Muslim countries. And yet here we are in the U.S. with "Christians" protesting the peaceful practice of other religions.

That's how it's always been. The first-generation immigrants are never 100% assimilated. Their children assimilate while retaining strong ties to the country of their parents. Their grandchildren have only a passing familiarity with the country of their grandparents. Beyond that, there is no meaningful connection left.

One of my great-great grandfathers on my father's side immigrated from Germany in the late 19th century. He refused to learn English. Although he of course died long before my birth, my Grandfather told me that he was never really able to communicate with his grandfather due to the language barrier. My surname was originally very German sounding until WWI when the family anglicized it to avoid anti-German sentiment. Today, I have no meaningful connection to Germany and it is only one of many countries my ancestors originated from. Give it 100 years, and it will be the same for the great great grandchildren of today's arrivals.

But places with socialism and abundant jobs still have low birthrates. You can debate the optimal economic system until you are blue in the face, but it's not the reason birthrates are low.

Once again, the facts do not support this narrative.

The vast majority of children born in impoverished countries do not actually migrate to other countries. Most continue to live where in the country or at least region where they were born. That's why the population of sub-Saharan Africa is growing quickly but the population of Europe and the United States is not. Even in countries that have seen mass population decline from migration (Venezuela), the vast majority of migrants have gone elsewhere in Latin America (mostly Colombia, Brazil, Argentina). But despite being desperately poor and having high net out-migration, Venezuela has birth rates similar to the U.S. (in part because it was historically much more wealthy and its population gets more remittances and other sources of support).

But basic cable wasn't just the OTA networks that could be otherwise viewed free. You were also paying for channels like ESPN, which Comcast had to pay to deliver. In fact, out of a $40 cable bill that included a package of ~20 basic cable stations, it wasn't uncommon for $5 to be paid to ESPN. Comcast very much cared if you watched ESPN because they needed to be able to sell their packages optimally to pay those fees. Comcast also cared if you watched HBO or other premium channels because they got a cut when you did.

That's not true. People paid for basic cable with commercials for decades before streaming. Only a select number of "premium" channels like HBO were ad-free. But there were also public stations (like PBS, CSPAN, and Public Access) that were commercial-free without being paid-for.

I think the current situation is better than it was in the cable days. Before, I had little choice but to deal with ads for most content. It was only a select number of shows on premium cable that could be experienced ad-free. Now, I can find almost anything ad-free if I'm willing to pay for it.

Any welfare state? The places with the highest birthrates have no welfare state to speak of. The facts simply don't conform to your ideologically driven preconceived notions.

The highest birthrates in the world are in countries like Chad and the Central African Republic (some of the poorest countries in the world). The people living in those countries receive no welfare or government support because their governments are not wealthy enough to provide welfare programs even if they wanted to. The most generous welfare states in the world are in Scandinavia and Middle Eastern petrostates where birthrates are below replacement.

The driver of birthrates is really quite simple: when people are given a choice, most choose to have fewer (or no) babies. I don't care how much money you have- raising kids properly is hard and involves a lot of personal sacrifice. I'm well off. I can afford to have more kids, but I don't want more than the two I have. Even if you gave me a billion dollars, that wouldn't change things. I'd still have to do all the hard work of raising them if I actually want to be a good parent and not end up with kids raised by nannies who hate me.

The only places where birthrates remain high are so poor that they cannot afford birth control. As countries rise out of poverty, birthrates plummet. China used to have an extremely high birthrate, then it got wealthier and birthrates are now below replacement (even though the government pulled a total 180 from discouraging having children to actively encouraging it). Birthrates are also plummeting in India as extreme poverty has declined.

I don't think Plato's comments about the actions of the leaders of Greek city states are really relevant here. Plato was not talking about immigration in the modern sense.

It's not inflation or housing costs causing birthrates to decline.

Housing in places like Akita Prefecture where birthrates are falling the fastest is super cheap. In rural areas, they will literally give you a free house. Japan as a whole has mostly experienced deflation over the last 30 years.