Suppose I am in my prime years. Should I help design the social system that opresses the young or the old? I will never be young again... and so the Soylent Green option is not workable! The young are pretty much doomed, the only question is as to the exact mechanism of oppression.
Alternative to debt burden would be oppressive taxes, but this has bad side-effects as well:
1. Taxes are not as discriminating against the young as situation dictates (debt is very discriminative)
2. People actually feel angry when money is taken from them via taxes. They are a lot less angry when they willfully spend themselves into debt. They even feel guilty when they can't pay. Bottom line is that it's easier to enforce because voluntary compliance is so much higher and political resistance to "pay your debt" is harder to imagine than to "pay high taxes".
3. Taxes depress economic development, while debt increases it (at the expense of the boom-bust volatility).
So I don't really see any realistic alternatives to the debt burden.
There is a very remote hope that technology brings us basic necessities too cheap to meter so that we don't have save for retirement. But that's really out there.
No argument with the above, except ... if you aren't paying into the fisc, you just might find that your posture is not so great. In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominion future history "Taxpayers" were in a class way above those who lived in "welfare islands".
I wouldn't assume our current political order survives this looming mess (heck, many including me argue it didn't survive the Civil War or FDR).
Alternative to debt burden would be oppressive taxes, but this has bad side-effects as well:
1. Taxes are not as discriminating against the young as situation dictates (debt is very discriminative)
2. People actually feel angry when money is taken from them via taxes. They are a lot less angry when they willfully spend themselves into debt. They even feel guilty when they can't pay. Bottom line is that it's easier to enforce because voluntary compliance is so much higher and political resistance to "pay your debt" is harder to imagine than to "pay high taxes".
3. Taxes depress economic development, while debt increases it (at the expense of the boom-bust volatility).
So I don't really see any realistic alternatives to the debt burden.
There is a very remote hope that technology brings us basic necessities too cheap to meter so that we don't have save for retirement. But that's really out there.