I do mean the subtext of “broken” implies instead that there’s one “fix”, if only we did x or stopped doing y.

Individual humans can take part in the fixing process and can sometimes make contributions which have a substantial impact on the outcome.

But the bulk of change will be in the large scale natural flow of history. There are many millions of people taking part at big personal cost. For example poor Tenenbaum’s $675,000 debt is only one drip in the process.

My suggestion for how to change is to first understand the problem at the appropriate scale, which is at least a half century and trillions of dollars.

(This is hilariously well said: “it isn’t anywhere close to optimal public policy and narrowly, many of its specifics are bizarre or offensive. Retroactive extension is probably the canonical instance of both.”)