Worst Statistic of the Day

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money comes the piece most detached from reality I've seen this year:

When Josh McFarland graduated from Stanford he owed $40,000 in student loans and couldn't fathom a way he'd ever pay it off and have a future for himself - not unusual for the typical young adult these days. Then he went to work for Google.

As a product manager, he got stock options and cashed them in over the five years he worked there. He married a fellow Google employee, so she had stock too. Then she moved on to Yelp, and he quit to launch TellApart, which provides technology solutions for e-commerce sites. Now 33, McFarland has a 3-year-old and a newborn and no longer has to think about his student loan: His company has $17.75 million in venture capital investment. While he doesn't consider himself retire-now rich, his piece of the company affords him what he calls "breathing room" and what other people might call wealth.

McFarland is on the starting end of Generation Y, the cohort born in the United States after 1980 that is typically portrayed as saddled with massive student debt, underemployed and underpaid. More than a third of the 80 million group of so-called millennials live with their parents, according to the Pew Research Group.

But McFarland is part of the sizeable minority that is doing quite well: 12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000, according to the Ipsos MediaCT's Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. Many of them, in technology fields, live frugal work-based lifestyles and are not saddled with the six-digit student debt held by doctors and lawyers.

Paul Campos researched this statistic and discovered where it came from:

The source of the wrongheaded statistic appears to be this: the cited survey claims 59 million Americans live in households with incomes of $100,000 plus, and that 20% of “affluent consumers” are in the Gen Y cohort (this appears to mean that 20% of the adults who live in households with $100,000+ incomes are of this age). The story’s author then did some very bad math to generate the claim that “12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000.” 

But that is totally different than these people making > $100,000 per annum.  That could also be people who are utterly unemployable living in their parent's basement. Or a trophy wife/husband of a hedge-fund billionaire. Or it could be 5 young adults sharing a house together, all making $22,000 a year as Starbucks' employees. 

At the very least it uses a highly no-representative sample and portrays the wealth of young adults in a completely misleading way.  This does not add to the conversation and it appears in the New York Times.  If only they had a prominent economist on staff who could consult over this type of data . . .