So even though we disagree I appreciate you engaging me without being too condescending. It's refreshing.

> but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever

I think that point can be argued. It's not as though college education is absolutely, 100%, non-negotiably REQUIRED to live a middle class life. All other things equal it sure does help, I won't argue that. The notion that the debt just mysteriously appeared on the books for these people is a non-starter. A choice was made to go to college either by them or their parents. It's not as though you graduate high school and find out that someone racked up 100k in debt in your name and now it's your problem to pay it off. And there are plenty of jobs which don't require a degree and pay fairly well. Right now there is a shortage of welders in the US. No degree required.

But welding isn't sexy, it's not what most people dream about, and people generally can't follow their passions there. Instead they go to school and earn degrees that are now useless but because of the huge amount of time and money sunk into them, they hold out to try and find the jobs that they've been trained for (which no longer exist) instead of making the best and getting new training. I think that's part of the folly of the follow your dreams mentality; it teaches people that unless it's what they've dreamed about it's beneath them. Yet if they're unemployed one could argue that no honest work should be beneath them and yet they must persist in thinking that it is, as evidenced by their behavior.

> Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me

Just because something worked for someone 20+ years ago doesn't mean it IS correct, it just means it WAS correct. The things that made my grandparents successful isn't what made my parents successful and neither is what is making me (probably) successful. To apply no critical thinking, as an adult, to the advice you give your kids is shameful in my mind. Maybe I'm unreasonable.

I will absolutely acknowledge the economic problems as a huge contributing factor to the problem. If there was no Internet and huge amounts of automation then I agree that people could have pursued degrees that merely signaled fitness for SOME work (like humanities) rather than fitness for PARTICULAR work (STEM) and done fine.

Why is the economy in the doldrums the way it is? I would argue that the Fed has kept the interest rate artificially low, thus enabling corporations to finance capital equipment much more cheaply than they otherwise would. That makes automation attractive and labor unattractive, pushing down wages in all industries except for the automation industry. Which is a smaller industry than all those it is replacing workers in.

At a 2% interest rate a $1mm robot costs perhaps only $40k a year in interest and principal. A union auto workers costs more like $60k/year plus benefits, needs time off, wants raises, and won't work 24 hours a day. But at 6% interest the robot and person cost about the same, and at 8% interest the person is cheaper at least on a strictly cashflow basis.

If you do a little math you can discover that the interest rate has a very strong effect on the breakeven equipment cost versus a worker in terms of monthly payments. Pushing the interest rate down might "stimulate the economy" but it does so in incredibly poisonous ways. We've been borrowing and spending our way to prosperity for a while now, but debt is really increased consumption now by forgoing even more future consumption. Eventually you can't pull any more future to the present and instead of further indebtedness people opt for less indebtedness. It turns out that the growth in the economy is highly leveraged on the debt growth rate such that debt shrinking causes a big recession.

The boomers wanted to have their cake (economic growth) and eat it too (no period of deleveraging) and they -- just like their parents -- kicked the can down the road. Eventually the can stops moving and we start paying the price for it.

This phenomena is incredibly similar to the "follow your dreams" nonsense. More growth without pain sounds great until you find out someone has to pay the price. Same for the theory "do whatever you want in school" because as it turns out, the skills you may or may not have acquired in school have a large impact on your ability to not live at home with your parents. In both cases people stuck their heads in the sand and pretended that reality didn't exist because they didn't like the implications.