I'm Not Sure We Should Let 18 Year Olds Sign Long Term Contracts
There's a lot of ways to (potentially) ruin your life at 18: addiction, bad marriages, get pregnant without wanting to, commit a crime that gets you locked up for decades.
I think a lot of us have a very uncomfortable relationship with the rights of 18 year olds. It's our societally-defined cutoff for Adulthood, and modern western individualism fundamentally rests on the premise that all adults are equal (except for some exceptions).
And yet, ~everyone over the age of 19 thinks that their 18 year old self was dumb and made very bad decisions.
I hear people making all kinds of ad-hoc arguments about this, often citing the claim that our brains aren't fully formed till 25, though to my knowledge that's a made-up cutoff at an arbitrary point on an asymptote.
The arguments are usually very selective, claiming that we can't hold 18-25 year olds responsible for X, without asking what that implies about their ability to Y.
Anyway.
When I think about the ways that people I know personally have seriously and negatively impacted their lives for decades, a lot of it comes down to signing contracts at age 18.
Some of them committed themselves to government-sponsored programs that irrevocably tied them to terrible jobs for a decade or so; many many others got into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, often for graduate degrees that have proven almost-worthless.
My friend group is unfathomably selection-biased, and shouldn't count for much. But I recently stumbled on a personal finance podcast[^1] where the (generally working-class) guests describe their financial issues.
From the few episodes I've listened to, the original sin for many of them is a massive student, car or medical loan they took out at 18.
I'm not sure where this leaves me. I understand that if you ban long-term-contracts for 18 year olds, the alternative isn't magical free money for 18 year olds, it's that they wouldn't be able to get that house/car/masters degree at all. It's obviously illiberal (in the classic sense) to prevent people freely agreeing to contracts, and I care a lot about classical liberty.
And yet.... something sits uneasily for me about allowing someone who days or months previously was not allowed to do basic things without their parents' permission suddenly being able to commit themselves to obligations that can haunt them for longer than they've yet been alive.
Could we have a phase-in? Could we cap how much you can borrow at 18, or how many years of your life you can commit yourself to something, and then raise it a bit every year till your mid-20s?
I don't know, I just don't know.
[^1]: I'm not naming this show because I partly hate it. The host is aggressively rude to the guests, which I guess could be justified if it functioned as a wake-up-call for the guest, but seems like it's mostly for the audience's amusement. He also reads ads for financial services companies that I think are a terrible idea for a financially un-savvy audience.