Last year, for the first time the total weight of American citizens exceeded the total weight of cattle in the U.S. This has apparently come about as increasingly overweight Americans are eating more pork and less beef.
We learned recently that the total amount of energy consumed every day by people updating their Facebook pages exceeds the total annual energy consumption of Luxembourg.
And last year the total amount of debt held by Americans in their credit-card accounts was exceeded by the amount of outstanding student-loan debt.
OK, so we made up the first two. But really, does anybody have a handle on what the proper ratio of cattle weight and human weight is, or of energy consumption by server farms and landlocked European nations? Or of credit-card debt and student-aid debt? According to the Federal Reserve, credit-card debt has fallen significantly since 2008. Is education debt subject to the same forces or different forces? Are more people going to college? More people who rely on assistance to pay the bills? Have people learned that it’s better to take federal student loans than to rack up high-interest credit-card debt while they are in college? Or are more and more students really getting into situations that will threaten their futures?
There are many serious questions about the magnitude, the sources, and the remedies for problems with student debt in the U.S. Answers to those important questions are not advanced by tossing around meaningless statistical comparisons.
