Every piece of historic evidence tends to prove that higher education for an ever growing part of the population seem to correlate with better living standards.
In societies with large surpluses, young people can afford to waste years of their life on unproductive endeavours. That’s correlation not causation. It’s like lifestyle diseases. Nobody would encourage you to be sedentary, even though that’s correlated with higher living standards too.
That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on cause and effect. It seems trivially obvious that, as living standards improve and people have higher levels of disposable income, we would invest it in educating our children, possibly at extremely poor rates of return.
Every piece of historic evidence tends to prove that mobile phone usage for an ever growing part of the population seems to correlate with better living standards.