5 ms·

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it get

by djtango 9mo ago

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations. A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite. Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

zmgsabst 9mo ago
Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
huhkerrf 9mo ago
> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
- vanviegen 9mo ago
  If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
  - djtango 9mo ago
    Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...
    - mlrtime 9mo ago
      It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC. Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
    - huhkerrf 9mo ago
      That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.
    - BrenBarn 9mo ago
      The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
      - vanviegen 9mo ago
        The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data. The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.
- sehansen 9mo ago
  That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials. 0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...
  - huhkerrf 9mo ago
    Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

by djtango 9mo ago

zmgsabst 9mo ago

Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.

huhkerrf 9mo ago

> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...

vanviegen 9mo ago
If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
- djtango 9mo ago
  Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC. Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
  - huhkerrf 9mo ago
    That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.
  - BrenBarn 9mo ago
    The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
    - vanviegen 9mo ago
      The problem with countering lived experience with data, is that whatever data you can provide, it's very unlikely to capture the exact sentiment you're addressing. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try, of course. But one should be very open to the possibility that things are happening outside of your specific data. The most infuriating example, to me, is the overuse of GDP. As if that should tell us everything.
sehansen 9mo ago
That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials. 0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...
- huhkerrf 9mo ago
  Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question. I'm happy to be proven wrong.