re: Millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did—despite being better educated

Have an upvote. Fantastic

That's just because you only see what you want to see. Most of it has been pretty solid posting.

It would be a lot easier for me to feel bad for my generation if they wanted to fix the problems they are complaining about but they don't. They want to double and triple down on passing expenses off to taxpayers, which means prices will continue to rise, and the conditions for the middle class will continue to deteriorate (there's no actual evidence of this over the long run FYI). If Millenials stopped drinking the Keynesian cool-aid, I could understand the grudge.

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Many pundits, politicians and economists claim that wages have fallen behind productivity gains over the last generation. This "decoupling" explains allegedly stagnant (or in some versions of the story, declining) middle-class incomes and is held out as a crisis of the market economy.

This story, though, is built on an illusion. There is no great decoupling of worker pay from productivity. Nor have workers' incomes stagnated over the past four decades.

The illusion is the result of two mistakes that are routinely made when pay is compared with productivity. First, the value of fringe benefits—such as health insurance and pension contributions—is often excluded from calculations of worker pay. Because fringe benefits today make up a larger share of the typical employee's pay than they did 40 years ago (about 19% today compared with 10% back then), excluding them fosters the illusion that the workers' slice of the (bigger) pie is shrinking.

The second mistake is to use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to adjust workers' pay for inflation while using a different measure—for example the GDP deflator, which converts the current prices of all domestically produced final goods and services into constant dollars—to adjust the value of economic output for inflation. But as Harvard's Martin Feldstein noted in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper in 2008, it is misleading to use different deflators.

Different inflation adjustments give conflicting estimates of just how much the dollar's purchasing power has fallen. So to accurately compare the real (that is, inflation-adjusted) value of output to the real value of worker pay requires that these values both be calculated using the same price index.

Consider, for instance, that between 1970-2006 the CPI rose at an average annual rate of 4.3%, while the GDP deflator rose only 3.8%. Economists believe that such a difference arises because the CPI is especially prone to overestimate inflation. Therefore, much of the increase in the real purchasing power of workers' pay is mistakenly labeled by the CPI as mere inflation.

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The myth of the decoupling of wages from productivity

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It would be a lot easier for me to feel bad for my generation if they wanted to fix the problems they are complaining about but they don't.

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No generation wants to pay the price for fixing their problems. The buck has always been passed. Which is why we're here now. Eventually we're going to run out of band-aids and the whole house of cards is going to come down. And it's not going to be pretty.

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That’s a low iq analysis

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And your response is low iq.

Stupid comment begets stupid comment.

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People on here love to jerk off to how awesome the skilled trades are but I guarantee you they all send their kids to college.

Those trade jobs are for the "others." My kids deserve better.

The lack of self awareness is hilarious.

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There is some of this.

But you're ignoring that most posters saying this shite probably have the resources such that sending their kids to college isn't a financial hardship on themselves or the kids. Maybe I'm overstating that some but I imagine most of these discussions consist of people in that general bubble.

Moreover, I think a lot would take objection to "deserve better." I don't have kids, admittedly, but that wouldn't be my stance. It has more to do with playing odds, and the odds are that a college degree certainly won't hurt you regardless of the path taken.

I compare it to the constant "it doesn't matter what college/law school you go to" shite on here. Yes it does. Going to a shite school doesn't mean you can't do well, but it probably means you'll have to work harder and will have a smaller margin for error to get to the same place as someone from a better school.

The same is true for degree vs. no-degree. I don't think trade jobs are for "other people." I do think being successful without college provides you narrower options, and if I had the financial ability to avoid putting my kid on a narrower path to success, I would do so. I expect a lot of people look at it similarly.

A lot of millenials are scared to negotiate and walk on a bad deal. They don't want to be stranded and left without a job.

Also employers would rather replace the person than actually develop them. Everyone wants the finished product.

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People on here love to jerk off to how awesome the skilled trades are but I guarantee you they all send their kids to college.

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Who said they're fricking awesome? They're hard work. What they are, however, is an option for someone who wants to make a good wage who can't afford the current cost of college.

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Those trade jobs are for the "others." My kids deserve better.

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And this is a shitty attitude to take.

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The lack of self awareness is hilarious.

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And your inability to grasp basic ideas is as well.