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> The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest.

But WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages?

They have a high debt-to-wage ratio in some fields and quite reasonable ratios in others. People with STEM degrees as a whole are better off than those with less immediately relevant degrees. If these trends have been going on for some time and the factors underlying them haven't been changing, then why has the primary message been "do what you love" instead of "do something that will keep you alive" since as it seems, the future is kinda bleak right now.

> But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system.

I was doing EXACTLY the opposite. The problem is that people have unrealistic expectations because they've been set-up by their parents or society or whoever (it's nebulous) to fail. If employment in general is terrible but in some fields it's still good, telling people to "do what they love" is idiotic at best and criminally negligent at worst.

Here's a quote from my original post: "But what that cheery, the-world-is-your-oyster message fails to communicate is that life can be difficult and that for a great many people just keeping themselves alive SOMEHOW is really about all that they can do. And that for the entire history of the world minus about 50 years that could be considered Success(tm)."

So how exactly am I blaming people's motivation?




The canard is that you've accepted that there's a "primary message" of "do what you love" or "the-world-is-your-oyster" without showing how it has actually affected society. I argue that the perception of such a message has had nothing to do with any of youth's current economic woes.

It completely sidesteps the real issues. Let's say nobody told any young child of the 80s and 90s that they were special and the entire job market shifted on them anyway. They'd still be living at their parents' house, because they have no jobs, high debt and not much of a financial independence ahead of them. It's a logical thing to do when your parents have stable incomes and you do not.

Please read through my other comments in this thread, but my point is that the entire market shifted, which we agree on. Where I disagree, and frankly, get really annoyed about, is placing the blame on how these students were raised for wholly unrelated economic trajectories.

This has nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with realities. Realities that are being dealt with by boomeranging.

As for "WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages," I've also discussed, but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever, especially for recent graduates. They have high debt and low wages because they have high debt and low wages. An ontology, for sure, but just as likely a vicious cycle: One must have a degree to get a good job in one's chosen field, but having a degree may no longer advance one's position and yet, not having a degree could be far worse.

As noted throughout this thread, students have been choosing essentially the same degrees for decades, regardless of job prospects in those fields. The things that changed to create the boomerang problem (assuming we see it as a problem), are all outside of those choices: increasing education costs, poorer job prospects across nearly all fields, etc. etc.

If job prospects were related to field of study, you'd expect to see shifts in completed degree fields over the years, but we don't.

So back to the "primary message," as you put it. Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me and, again, it's completely unrelated to the real economic reality. To me, that framing sounds a lot like "kids these days" and doesn't isn't helpful at all, especially when it appears "kids will be kids" seems the more apt cliche to use when talking about choice of degree.


So even though we disagree I appreciate you engaging me without being too condescending. It's refreshing.

> but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever

I think that point can be argued. It's not as though college education is absolutely, 100%, non-negotiably REQUIRED to live a middle class life. All other things equal it sure does help, I won't argue that. The notion that the debt just mysteriously appeared on the books for these people is a non-starter. A choice was made to go to college either by them or their parents. It's not as though you graduate high school and find out that someone racked up 100k in debt in your name and now it's your problem to pay it off. And there are plenty of jobs which don't require a degree and pay fairly well. Right now there is a shortage of welders in the US. No degree required.

But welding isn't sexy, it's not what most people dream about, and people generally can't follow their passions there. Instead they go to school and earn degrees that are now useless but because of the huge amount of time and money sunk into them, they hold out to try and find the jobs that they've been trained for (which no longer exist) instead of making the best and getting new training. I think that's part of the folly of the follow your dreams mentality; it teaches people that unless it's what they've dreamed about it's beneath them. Yet if they're unemployed one could argue that no honest work should be beneath them and yet they must persist in thinking that it is, as evidenced by their behavior.

> Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me

Just because something worked for someone 20+ years ago doesn't mean it IS correct, it just means it WAS correct. The things that made my grandparents successful isn't what made my parents successful and neither is what is making me (probably) successful. To apply no critical thinking, as an adult, to the advice you give your kids is shameful in my mind. Maybe I'm unreasonable.

I will absolutely acknowledge the economic problems as a huge contributing factor to the problem. If there was no Internet and huge amounts of automation then I agree that people could have pursued degrees that merely signaled fitness for SOME work (like humanities) rather than fitness for PARTICULAR work (STEM) and done fine.

Why is the economy in the doldrums the way it is? I would argue that the Fed has kept the interest rate artificially low, thus enabling corporations to finance capital equipment much more cheaply than they otherwise would. That makes automation attractive and labor unattractive, pushing down wages in all industries except for the automation industry. Which is a smaller industry than all those it is replacing workers in.

At a 2% interest rate a $1mm robot costs perhaps only $40k a year in interest and principal. A union auto workers costs more like $60k/year plus benefits, needs time off, wants raises, and won't work 24 hours a day. But at 6% interest the robot and person cost about the same, and at 8% interest the person is cheaper at least on a strictly cashflow basis.

If you do a little math you can discover that the interest rate has a very strong effect on the breakeven equipment cost versus a worker in terms of monthly payments. Pushing the interest rate down might "stimulate the economy" but it does so in incredibly poisonous ways. We've been borrowing and spending our way to prosperity for a while now, but debt is really increased consumption now by forgoing even more future consumption. Eventually you can't pull any more future to the present and instead of further indebtedness people opt for less indebtedness. It turns out that the growth in the economy is highly leveraged on the debt growth rate such that debt shrinking causes a big recession.

The boomers wanted to have their cake (economic growth) and eat it too (no period of deleveraging) and they -- just like their parents -- kicked the can down the road. Eventually the can stops moving and we start paying the price for it.

This phenomena is incredibly similar to the "follow your dreams" nonsense. More growth without pain sounds great until you find out someone has to pay the price. Same for the theory "do whatever you want in school" because as it turns out, the skills you may or may not have acquired in school have a large impact on your ability to not live at home with your parents. In both cases people stuck their heads in the sand and pretended that reality didn't exist because they didn't like the implications.


zecho: "students have been choosing essentially the same degrees for decades, regardless of job prospects in those fields"

Yes, but recently the cost for this education has risen exponentially. We've all known STEM offers great job prospects for over a decade now. There's no reason to put this kind of money out there for a degree that won't pay you back.

Liberal arts educations ARE good; when they're cheap. Paying 10k+ a year for them makes zero sense and people making these decisions aren't thinking clearly.




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