Unsure whether you will feel better with the story "there's no conspiracy to screw youth, this is just the result of shifts in impersonal economic parameters only incidentally correlated to age cohorts" But that's probably closer to an accurate description of the world here :/
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Ok I forgot then I got super busy, in cycles! But here I am with insomnia. (i) It's really hard to get into counterfactuals like this. Possibly the financial crisis, in its precise form, would have been averted or attenuated. On the other hand, to the extent that . . .
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. . . the recession was a result of incorrect beliefs about the housing market, derivatives may not have made much of a difference. I could tell stories in either direction, and as far as I know the postmortem hasn't really settled on any of them. This is a common problem . . .
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in macroeconomics, where we spent 1/6 of my 1st year PhD sequence picking at the Great Depression (where, surprise, there was no consensus). Another case study in macro-agnosticism: we don't have a clean theory of why the *Industrial Revolution* to happen where and when it did.
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Major and genuinely-macroeconomic events tend to be (i) idiosyncratic, (ii) unexpected, and (iii) plausibly influenced by a large number of exogenous factors. This makes it basically impossible to build a robust theory to consistently predict policy counterfactuals. :/
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(ii) Education! Education is a fucking mess. It's likely that all else equal, the price of education for undergraduate students has increased wealth inequality in the United States. But it's not obvious to me that better funding from the state would have fixed this. :c
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You can view direct and indirect support for student tuition as subsidies to students; but the thing about subsidies is that they're never completely "captured" by the immediate recipient. In the case of education, schools can respond to students having more money . . .
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by increasing tuition, and getting a slice of the pie for themselves. Direct funding by the state for schools doesn't solve this problem either. Organizations have an infinite capacity for burning money, and when you shovel more into them without some mechanism . . .
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to control costs, there's no reason to expect to get much for your investment. A second issue is that school, as a tool for increasing productivity (and so expected wages), may be more useless than not. You can get one side from
@bryan_caplan's _The Case Against Education_, or -
check out
@nickchk's feed for a more optimistic take. (Nick, grats on the handle change!) There are other issues floating around with schools--say, student preferences for job status and amenities vs simple wages (why not just be a plumber? pay's great!)--to the point that . . . -
in aggregate I'd argue you should deep uncertainty about the relationship between schools and societal income, or at least about the likelihood that a simple policy change like "feed more money into tuition support" affecting millennial job prospects much. :(
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