I just love the graph above which I sampled from this post at The Atlantic by Lyman Stone on “how the Boomers ruined everything”. I would submit that it tells us exactly nothing other than, perhaps, the wages of illegal immigrants are pretty low. Why? Because it aggregates things that should not be aggregated. So, for example, why combine PhDs and MDs? I would suggest that if you disaggregated them it would tell a dramatically different story. Most people with PhDs earn less than $60,000 per year while most medical doctors earn more than $150,000 per year (the median wage is over $190,000/year). Similarly with Master’s degrees. The median starting salary for a Harvard MBA is $160,000. The median income for an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) is under $40,000. To put my complaint into statistical terminology the distributions within the categories are themselves not Gaussian but bimodal or polymodal.
About the article itself there are lots of things in it with which I disagree. For example, I don’t think you can blame the huge increase in licensing on the Baby Boomers. Quite to the contrary. Licensing allows people without experience to compete with people who have experience. Those who benefited most from the big bump over the last 20 years have been GenXers.
But this I agree with:
The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems like excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.
all of which was completely foreseeable and completely ignored over a period of 60 years. Which brings me to the real culprits. The Baby Boomers do not now and never have controlled the United States. That would be the Silent Generation. Just look at the Congressional leadership and you’ll see what I mean.
There are lots of interesting charts and graphs, mostly excellent examples of how to lie with statistics. Just as an example, when the Baby Boomers were born the U. S. immigrant population was 4%. Now it’s 17%, many of them with poor command of English and not much formal education. That is a formula for many of the ills presented in the article. When the immigrant population was 4%, you didn’t need to disaggregate immigrants. Now you do or everything is just an inexplicable mystery.
Looking through a dozen or so sites, i see $80,000 listed as the median salary for a PhD right out of school. Somewhere around $100,000 with experience.
“According to PayScale, a compensation data company that publishes the going rates for various types of jobs, the average MFA degree-holder in the U.S. earns an annual salary of $58,000.”
I don’t know where you got your numbers, but they seem low. Also, how many grads are there with an MFA vs MBA? (The above chart seems odd. It looks at Household income per person.) Agree about the Baby Boomers. They have their problems, but our politics has been and contiues to be controlled by the older generation.
Steve
Maybe just a coincidence but Drum noted yesterday that we have never had a president who was born in the 50s and of the current candidates there was one born in 1950, but no one born in the rest of the 50s.
Steve