Economists like debt. It gets the economy moving. A debt-less economy is very slow. Most non-trivial projects require debt: starting a business, buying a house, getting an education. If you had to pay for those in cash, you'd do so much later if ever.

It's the reason most corporations have debt. They use it to fund expansion. As long as that expansion brings in more money than the interest payments, they literally never have to pay that debt back.

Human beings, unlike corporations, retire. Inflation certainly puts a crimp in that, but there are many other problems with retirement with large effects. Ultimately, those problems come down to an economy that continues to expand even after they've left the workforce, such that they can outpace inflation by either their own investments, or the government's.

Which, as I started with, is all about somebody taking out debts so that the economy expands. A vastly slower economy without debts is more straightforward to understand, but it's also a much more primitive and less productive one, and so everyone is worse off.