Headlines like this really reinforce my (admittedly woefully uninformed) opinion about headlines like this one posted here recently. I get that it’s not apples to apples to compare these articles,...
Headlines like this really reinforce my (admittedly woefully uninformed) opinion about headlines like this one posted here recently. I get that it’s not apples to apples to compare these articles, but as a millennial, it feels like the WaPo article is trying to hypnotize people into thinking there’s not a problem. Like “yeah sure, the sky is for sure falling right now and regular people are having a hard time paying for food, but you’re actually the most wealthy generation ever so don’t worry about it!”
I’m aware that it’s pretty tin-foil-hat to think that’s the actual intent of the WaPo article, but it elicits that gut reaction nonetheless.
Both things can be true. I am doing better than my parents were at my age, I'm also college educated (they weren't). I not only have more wealth than they did at this age, but a broader set of...
Both things can be true.
I am doing better than my parents were at my age, I'm also college educated (they weren't). I not only have more wealth than they did at this age, but a broader set of applicable skills.
But I see a lot of homelessness near me. I have friends my age who are struggling, either living with parents or working questionable jobs to barely pay rent and sometimes skip meals. These friends don't have more wealth, more skills, didn't go to college, etc.
Isn't it that case that with massive inequality, regulatory capture, oligarchs, etc that we see greater peaks of troughs? There's very little middle ground.
Absolutely both are true at the same time. Looking back on the past 10 years alone, there might have been at least three versions of myself at vastly different levels of wealth: We way over...
Absolutely both are true at the same time.
Looking back on the past 10 years alone, there might have been at least three versions of myself at vastly different levels of wealth:
We way over extended ourselves to get the highest amount of mortgage possible to buy House A for $350,000, sell in 2020 for $750,000. Net 400k.
We get a comfortable mortgage in the bad part of town for $200,000 and sell for $400,000. Net 200k.
We look at the insane housing market that's been shooting up nonstop since the 90s and surely that can't continue, and rent at twice the mortgage payments per month. Net loss $120,000 by 2020 when rent nearly doubles, take on a housemate to help out. Net loss a further $180,000 by 2025.
In version 1 I would have more wealth than my parents at the same age.
In version 2 we'd be about evenly matched but I would have less disposable income.
In version 3 I would have less than my parents.
(Secret version 4: using the $300,000 equity from version 1, roll it towards even more expensive houses, end up with way way way more wealth in those ten years.)
With massive inequality et al, as you mentioned, some of us bet on black and some of us on red, to very hugely different outcomes.
It's 100% a false dichotomy. By dollars I am doing much better than my parents were at my current age. Except that while I make 2-3x what my father did housing is 4-5x what it was back then.
It's 100% a false dichotomy.
By dollars I am doing much better than my parents were at my current age. Except that while I make 2-3x what my father did housing is 4-5x what it was back then.
If you look at that WaPo article you mention, you'll see that despite its title, it's nowhere near the attempted brainwashing you're suggesting. The people quoted in the article basically say the...
If you look at that WaPo article you mention, you'll see that despite its title, it's nowhere near the attempted brainwashing you're suggesting. The people quoted in the article basically say the supposed "record wealth" of older millennials is mostly a paper tiger. The people who are skewing the average are usually locked into their homes and unable to realize the paper gains they've made because they can't easily liquidate. They still get many benefits from homeownership, particularly with fixed-rate mortgages, but the authors are scrupulous to point out that this represents survivorship bias more than a general trend in wealth. Also, it points out that the feds' accounting is a bit screwy due to how they count adults living with older relatives, which is a much more common thing now than it has been in generations past.
In short, the article pretty much lands on the numbers don't give an accurate picture, and the stratification the numbers do represent is bad news.
The headline might seem misleading, but really the answer the piece comes to to the question is: accounting fuckery.
The problem is that in this day and age, a LOT of people are going to just read the headline -- plenty of people do that even on Tildes, and I can't imagine it's better on other social media. Just...
The headline might seem misleading, but really the answer the piece comes to to the question is: accounting fuckery.
The problem is that in this day and age, a LOT of people are going to just read the headline -- plenty of people do that even on Tildes, and I can't imagine it's better on other social media. Just reading the headline could mislead those people, who could go on to talk to or about the young people in their lives (who probably aren't even millennials, much less the rich older cohort the article discussed) like they're better off than their parents and their complaints about being unable to afford food and rent are just entitlement. Even when the article itself is ultimately nuanced, a misleading title can still mislead and is still a failure of the editors imo.
Is it misleading, or is it in dialogue with other reports that claim a big turnaround in the wealth held by millennials? It asks what's behind the wealth increase, and the article comes up with a...
Is it misleading, or is it in dialogue with other reports that claim a big turnaround in the wealth held by millennials? It asks what's behind the wealth increase, and the article comes up with a nuanced answer.
I have a lot of criticisms for most of the big media outlets, but I can only fault them so much for mildly ambiguous headlines. That just seems like looking for stuff to get indignant about, and there's already plenty of that laying around.
I think the fact that they use "young people" rather than "millennials" in the headline is already pretty misleading, and I dislike the general framing of the headline as well (though in that case...
I think the fact that they use "young people" rather than "millennials" in the headline is already pretty misleading, and I dislike the general framing of the headline as well (though in that case I'll acknowledge that I don't see a super obvious alternative in the same way).
Those are valid concerns, certainly, and I'm not trying to say that headlines aren't valid targets of criticism, especially today, when we're all deeply embroiled in an ideological war in which...
Exemplary
Those are valid concerns, certainly, and I'm not trying to say that headlines aren't valid targets of criticism, especially today, when we're all deeply embroiled in an ideological war in which words are weaponized to frame reality for the populace in often misleading and self-serving ways.
Let me explain the train of thought that led me to initially comment, and maybe that will elucidate the concern I'm trying but failing to express.
When I first saw the post for the WaPo analysis on the front page, I did what I think a lot of people like myself who've become cynical and embittered about the state of public discourse often do, which is read the headline and the submission comment and reject the piece as irrelevant, if not pure hogwash. I remember reading "... it sounds a bit like survivorship bias" in @skybrians's submission excerpt and thinking, "Huh. That's a bit surprising." Then I pretty much shelved the link under "Not interested."
Then a couple of days later I found this post and scanned the article. I don't know why I was interested enough to do that for this one and not the other. Maybe it's because I have a little experience in volunteering and so it felt more relevant to my interests, maybe it was anxiety about the election, maybe I just had more time to fill when I happened upon it. Whatever the case, I scanned it and went to the comments, as one does.
Then I saw @frowns's comment and reference to the earlier post, and as I was reading, I remembered that line from skybrians's excerpt and thought, "hang on, is that really what that article was saying?" So I went back and gave the piece the attention I probably should've given it in the first place, then synopsized it under frowns's comment.
Now, you could point out that this suggests that whoever wrote the headline (who was almost certainly not the authors of the piece, but the department editor; a little inside baseball for you there) failed. If a headline's job is to entice the reader to stop and pay attention, it didn't do a very good job on me. Perhaps they were angling for that indignant engagement that all the cool kids trade in these days. I don't know.
Some measure of criticism is due to the editor for framing the headline in such a way that someone can just scan it and dismiss the whole thing, but some of the fault has to lie with me, who drew a conclusion without giving the thing due consideration. If I hadn't read skybrians's excerpt, I might never have noticed that I had jumped to a similar conclusion as did frowns, despite also being cognisant on some level of complicating info. I held both contradictory things in my head simultaneously, and it didn't cause me much discomfort. This worries me, to put it lightly.
So, is it a bad headline? I'm going to say yes. It definitely needs workshopping. I also think it's important to own up to my own complicity in brainwashing myself, though. I wasn't willing on some level to assume good faith on the part of the Post, so a less than mediocre headline just became one more pebble in a wall of my own making, a wall I'm building because of laziness and insecurity. That doesn't seem wise to me.
So my defense of the headline might be some attempt to absolve myself of some guilt for doing the thing so many of us do, and that I see leading us down a path to disaster. You could also look at it as a reminder to myself as much as everyone else to be a little more thoughtful about how we take in headlines without much thought and construct our walls. Journalists have a duty to be thorough and truthful when discoursing, editors have a duty to write good headlines that both engage and inform, but we also have a duty to be thoughtful readers and put some effort into trying to understand. Otherwise we're just fooling ourselves into feeling informed and that our opinions hold merit. I think there's more than enough of that going around.
This is also an issue in Canada. Every food bank in my city has long lines and runs out of food. Every park has a tent city. This is how fascism wins. I hope America saves itself. Canada is trying...
This is also an issue in Canada. Every food bank in my city has long lines and runs out of food. Every park has a tent city. This is how fascism wins. I hope America saves itself. Canada is trying their best to follow and while PP isn't a convicted criminal or as bad as Trump, he is our first step.
It's brutal. I work with postsecondary students and they're especially hard up. Formerly public subsidized tuition is going up and up every year, cost of living and rentals is insane -- even here...
It's brutal. I work with postsecondary students and they're especially hard up. Formerly public subsidized tuition is going up and up every year, cost of living and rentals is insane -- even here in Calgary where we always had a high quality of life, low taxes and lots of benefits, it's nuts.
Headlines like this really reinforce my (admittedly woefully uninformed) opinion about headlines like this one posted here recently. I get that it’s not apples to apples to compare these articles, but as a millennial, it feels like the WaPo article is trying to hypnotize people into thinking there’s not a problem. Like “yeah sure, the sky is for sure falling right now and regular people are having a hard time paying for food, but you’re actually the most wealthy generation ever so don’t worry about it!”
I’m aware that it’s pretty tin-foil-hat to think that’s the actual intent of the WaPo article, but it elicits that gut reaction nonetheless.
Both things can be true.
I am doing better than my parents were at my age, I'm also college educated (they weren't). I not only have more wealth than they did at this age, but a broader set of applicable skills.
But I see a lot of homelessness near me. I have friends my age who are struggling, either living with parents or working questionable jobs to barely pay rent and sometimes skip meals. These friends don't have more wealth, more skills, didn't go to college, etc.
Isn't it that case that with massive inequality, regulatory capture, oligarchs, etc that we see greater peaks of troughs? There's very little middle ground.
Absolutely both are true at the same time.
Looking back on the past 10 years alone, there might have been at least three versions of myself at vastly different levels of wealth:
We way over extended ourselves to get the highest amount of mortgage possible to buy House A for $350,000, sell in 2020 for $750,000. Net 400k.
We get a comfortable mortgage in the bad part of town for $200,000 and sell for $400,000. Net 200k.
We look at the insane housing market that's been shooting up nonstop since the 90s and surely that can't continue, and rent at twice the mortgage payments per month. Net loss $120,000 by 2020 when rent nearly doubles, take on a housemate to help out. Net loss a further $180,000 by 2025.
In version 1 I would have more wealth than my parents at the same age.
In version 2 we'd be about evenly matched but I would have less disposable income.
In version 3 I would have less than my parents.
(Secret version 4: using the $300,000 equity from version 1, roll it towards even more expensive houses, end up with way way way more wealth in those ten years.)
With massive inequality et al, as you mentioned, some of us bet on black and some of us on red, to very hugely different outcomes.
It's 100% a false dichotomy.
By dollars I am doing much better than my parents were at my current age. Except that while I make 2-3x what my father did housing is 4-5x what it was back then.
If you look at that WaPo article you mention, you'll see that despite its title, it's nowhere near the attempted brainwashing you're suggesting. The people quoted in the article basically say the supposed "record wealth" of older millennials is mostly a paper tiger. The people who are skewing the average are usually locked into their homes and unable to realize the paper gains they've made because they can't easily liquidate. They still get many benefits from homeownership, particularly with fixed-rate mortgages, but the authors are scrupulous to point out that this represents survivorship bias more than a general trend in wealth. Also, it points out that the feds' accounting is a bit screwy due to how they count adults living with older relatives, which is a much more common thing now than it has been in generations past.
In short, the article pretty much lands on the numbers don't give an accurate picture, and the stratification the numbers do represent is bad news.
The headline might seem misleading, but really the answer the piece comes to to the question is: accounting fuckery.
The problem is that in this day and age, a LOT of people are going to just read the headline -- plenty of people do that even on Tildes, and I can't imagine it's better on other social media. Just reading the headline could mislead those people, who could go on to talk to or about the young people in their lives (who probably aren't even millennials, much less the rich older cohort the article discussed) like they're better off than their parents and their complaints about being unable to afford food and rent are just entitlement. Even when the article itself is ultimately nuanced, a misleading title can still mislead and is still a failure of the editors imo.
Is it misleading, or is it in dialogue with other reports that claim a big turnaround in the wealth held by millennials? It asks what's behind the wealth increase, and the article comes up with a nuanced answer.
I have a lot of criticisms for most of the big media outlets, but I can only fault them so much for mildly ambiguous headlines. That just seems like looking for stuff to get indignant about, and there's already plenty of that laying around.
I think the fact that they use "young people" rather than "millennials" in the headline is already pretty misleading, and I dislike the general framing of the headline as well (though in that case I'll acknowledge that I don't see a super obvious alternative in the same way).
Those are valid concerns, certainly, and I'm not trying to say that headlines aren't valid targets of criticism, especially today, when we're all deeply embroiled in an ideological war in which words are weaponized to frame reality for the populace in often misleading and self-serving ways.
Let me explain the train of thought that led me to initially comment, and maybe that will elucidate the concern I'm trying but failing to express.
When I first saw the post for the WaPo analysis on the front page, I did what I think a lot of people like myself who've become cynical and embittered about the state of public discourse often do, which is read the headline and the submission comment and reject the piece as irrelevant, if not pure hogwash. I remember reading "... it sounds a bit like survivorship bias" in @skybrians's submission excerpt and thinking, "Huh. That's a bit surprising." Then I pretty much shelved the link under "Not interested."
Then a couple of days later I found this post and scanned the article. I don't know why I was interested enough to do that for this one and not the other. Maybe it's because I have a little experience in volunteering and so it felt more relevant to my interests, maybe it was anxiety about the election, maybe I just had more time to fill when I happened upon it. Whatever the case, I scanned it and went to the comments, as one does.
Then I saw @frowns's comment and reference to the earlier post, and as I was reading, I remembered that line from skybrians's excerpt and thought, "hang on, is that really what that article was saying?" So I went back and gave the piece the attention I probably should've given it in the first place, then synopsized it under frowns's comment.
Now, you could point out that this suggests that whoever wrote the headline (who was almost certainly not the authors of the piece, but the department editor; a little inside baseball for you there) failed. If a headline's job is to entice the reader to stop and pay attention, it didn't do a very good job on me. Perhaps they were angling for that indignant engagement that all the cool kids trade in these days. I don't know.
Some measure of criticism is due to the editor for framing the headline in such a way that someone can just scan it and dismiss the whole thing, but some of the fault has to lie with me, who drew a conclusion without giving the thing due consideration. If I hadn't read skybrians's excerpt, I might never have noticed that I had jumped to a similar conclusion as did frowns, despite also being cognisant on some level of complicating info. I held both contradictory things in my head simultaneously, and it didn't cause me much discomfort. This worries me, to put it lightly.
So, is it a bad headline? I'm going to say yes. It definitely needs workshopping. I also think it's important to own up to my own complicity in brainwashing myself, though. I wasn't willing on some level to assume good faith on the part of the Post, so a less than mediocre headline just became one more pebble in a wall of my own making, a wall I'm building because of laziness and insecurity. That doesn't seem wise to me.
So my defense of the headline might be some attempt to absolve myself of some guilt for doing the thing so many of us do, and that I see leading us down a path to disaster. You could also look at it as a reminder to myself as much as everyone else to be a little more thoughtful about how we take in headlines without much thought and construct our walls. Journalists have a duty to be thorough and truthful when discoursing, editors have a duty to write good headlines that both engage and inform, but we also have a duty to be thoughtful readers and put some effort into trying to understand. Otherwise we're just fooling ourselves into feeling informed and that our opinions hold merit. I think there's more than enough of that going around.
...damn, this is really well-written. Thank you for laying it all out like this.
Unless we know the demographics of food banks skew towards gen z it’s really apples and oranges.
This is also an issue in Canada. Every food bank in my city has long lines and runs out of food. Every park has a tent city. This is how fascism wins. I hope America saves itself. Canada is trying their best to follow and while PP isn't a convicted criminal or as bad as Trump, he is our first step.
It's brutal. I work with postsecondary students and they're especially hard up. Formerly public subsidized tuition is going up and up every year, cost of living and rentals is insane -- even here in Calgary where we always had a high quality of life, low taxes and lots of benefits, it's nuts.
This was framed as a political article but I think the information is important regardless.
Well, the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit program in the U.S. certainly didn't help.