Total student loan debt outstanding

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it apparently does, that as Americans have slowly buried themselves under mountains of educational debt—a process requiring no dogs whatsoever—postal workers have been bitten by them with decreasing frequency, as though the dogs themselves were gradually losing interest in the whole enterprise. One might imagine some vast cosmic ledger in which every dollar borrowed for a liberal arts degree is precisely offset by a dog somewhere deciding not to bite the mail carrier. The universe, it seems, abhors a vacuum but settles quite happily for correlation.

The real culprit is almost certainly that both trends follow the contours of the American economic cycle from 2016 to 2022, a period that began with recovery and ended with genuine chaos. Student loan debt increased steadily as enrollment held firm and interest accrued like compound interest does—which is to say, relentlessly—while dog bites may have dropped simply because fewer people were home to answer the door during the pandemic, or because mail carriers, suddenly essential workers, took precautions that would make a Victorian sanitarium blush. By 2022, Americans collectively owed about 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans, which, if converted to physical currency and stacked, would create a tower roughly 150,000 miles high—far enough to inconvenience the Moon. Meanwhile, dog bites fell from over 5,000 incidents annually to just under 4,000, a shift that probably says more about changing work patterns and social behaviour than about any relationship between education finance and canine restraint.

What we are witnessing here is not causation but the human brain's extraordinary talent for finding significance in the fact that two unrelated things happen to move in opposite directions for seven years. The student loan debt and the dog bites are like two strangers who happen to get on the same escalator, briefly moving in perfect synchrony before parting ways forever. We wanted them to mean something to each other.