Millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did–despite being better educated | Hacker News Reader

Millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did–despite being better educated

cnbc.com

25 pointshkmaxpro17 comments

Seems to be deliberately cherry picking data for the purpose of contraversey.

>median earnings for those 18 to 34 are lower

This is to be expected since people are spending more of that time in school rather than working full time. Better would be to compare them after they've completed school... Which they do, but...

>The average millennial’s wealth in 2016 (ages 23 to 38) was 41% less than those who were at a similar age in 1989

Now they've deliberately switched from "earnings" to "wealth". And that's to be expected if someone has spent the last 4-6 years in school rather than working.

The article is going out of their way to avoid an apples-to-apples comparison.

Having more degrees per capita or higher levels of degrees doesn’t necessarily mean “better educated.”

Not to mention it dilutes the value of having a degree.

Yes it does. That is exactly the definition of Education.

More != better. If it was, Princeton/Yale/Stanford/MIT/etc would not exist.

More information is not better than less?

Quite obviously. Google search would not exist if that wasn't the case.

You’re assuming there isn’t more noise too.

You're intentionally missing the point of his argument: eating more does not mean better nutrition.

Sure, you can always nitpick data and refuse to draw any conclusion ever.

You can also say that you cannot adjust the dollar value over long period, which is also true. You could also say that median or average do not represent accurately a population, which is also true.

This is the wonder of statistics, none is perfect and you can always find a way to discard them.

Education is only one factor. An economic boom based on the exploitation of wartime technology for consumer benefit fueled the boomers wealth growth.

Can you give a little more detail about what wartime technology fueled boomer wealth and the economy in general?

My limited understanding from HS was that the boom in the 1950s/60s was due to other nations rebuilding from WWII and needing goods and/or the Cold War causing lots of investment in rockets etc. so I'd love to hear more details than my previous knowledge.

The internet was initially funded as a wartime technology, amongst other things.

Despite having more years of schooling would be more accurate. The watering down of the curriculum over the last half century likely makes it very difficult to get a 'better education' today unless you intentionally work to make it for yourself. However, it is also much easier to do that today, if one is so motivated - what's needed here is a better proxy for quality of education than years of schooling or degrees obtained.

What do you even mean when you say quality? The access to information, experts, knowledge today is absolutely unprecedented and curriculum's are much more science based and people are exposed to so many different ideas.

I would argue education has never been better.

Sorry, I should have clarified - On the one hand, we have an unprecedented level of maturity and quality in the materials of instruction available to be curated. This is what I meant by saying that a motivated learner combined with a good curator/teacher has greater opportunities than ever. However, the standards of testing, the methods of evaluation, and the requirements of learning for a given grade level have all been slowly backsliding for nearly a century on average. So while we have some of the best access to materials ever, we have lower expectations of what their abilities should be, and cruder methods of evaluating them being applied more broadly (algorithmic essay grading, anyone?).

Or perhaps I'm seeing this wrong, and comparing high standards of education for a different era and cohort group against a much broader cohort group that, if I were comparing them against an earlier era, are in fact much better off than they used to be?

When everybody has a degree the value of a degree plummets. It's... logic?

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