> Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings? > Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at hi

> Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings? > Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes. There is an implied statistical argument here that by plotting "did X drop out" on one axis and their future income on another, that a correlation would refute a statement that "Schools cause students to earn less". Specifically, you would be: 1. Gathering many examples of individuals(a "population") with boolean "did they drop out?" V1, some income metric V2, maybe some others. 2. Comparing and aggregating V1 and V2 across the population 3. Using it to refute a statement S That is a statistical argument for ~S because it involves comparing population aggregates. You may not have explicitly used the word "statistics" or realized you did it, but you made a statistical argument.