Hm, not sure what happened to the Washington Post comments. Sorry about that. Here’s my guess as to what I was thinking:
The axes are comparing an average (median income) to a total (student loan debt). This is generally a recipe for uninformative comparisons. Worse, the average is both per person and per year. So by itself this tells you little about the debt burden shouldered by a typical member of a generation. For example, you could easily see growth in total debt while individual debt burden fell, depending on the growth in degrees awarded and the typical time to pay off debt. If you wanted to make claims about how debt burdens individuals, as the blurb does, you’d have to look at what’s happening with the typical debt of recent graduates.
But of course you can’t stop there and say, “Ah, Peter Thiel is trying to mislead me, I’m going to disbelieve what I see as his point.” Recent-graduate debt has been increasing, just not as much as the graph suggests. And maybe total student loan debt is a significant number in its own right?
(I don’t know if I had intended the above as “the answer”; more likely, I just wanted people thinking about it more thoroughly than some of the commentary I had seen at the time. You also make good points.)
Thanks for trying these out. I don’t think I ever heard in detail from anyone who did (beyond “this was neat”). If I were writing them today I’d be less coy about it.
Hm, not sure what happened to the Washington Post comments. Sorry about that. Here’s my guess as to what I was thinking:
The axes are comparing an average (median income) to a total (student loan debt). This is generally a recipe for uninformative comparisons. Worse, the average is both per person and per year. So by itself this tells you little about the debt burden shouldered by a typical member of a generation. For example, you could easily see growth in total debt while individual debt burden fell, depending on the growth in degrees awarded and the typical time to pay off debt. If you wanted to make claims about how debt burdens individuals, as the blurb does, you’d have to look at what’s happening with the typical debt of recent graduates.
But of course you can’t stop there and say, “Ah, Peter Thiel is trying to mislead me, I’m going to disbelieve what I see as his point.” Recent-graduate debt has been increasing, just not as much as the graph suggests. And maybe total student loan debt is a significant number in its own right?
(I don’t know if I had intended the above as “the answer”; more likely, I just wanted people thinking about it more thoroughly than some of the commentary I had seen at the time. You also make good points.)
Thanks for trying these out. I don’t think I ever heard in detail from anyone who did (beyond “this was neat”). If I were writing them today I’d be less coy about it.