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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

This article compares two graphs and deduces some rather broad realities from it, which are rather incorrect. It assumes that the state of the economy is the same today as it was 25 years ago: obviously, this isn't true. The skill sets in demand have changed drastically which must be accounted for.

That said, it does make the good point that it is rather easy to get misled by statistics that say that college graduates have lower unemployment rates. Or to assume that just by graduating high school/college guarantees a job, automagically.

I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless. Of course one doesn't have to go to college to get that. But it certainly seems like the most straightforward and fun way to do so (if you manage not to get too indebted etc.etc.).

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"I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless."

I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tabo...)

Unfortunately, making these tradeoffs is necessary, because there are many competing values and a limited supply of money. For example, you can show that a hospital must either a) assign a consistent dollar value to human life, or b) must be wasting resources, ie. it could be saving more lives with the money it has. See eg. Peter Singer's essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.ht....

That seems a very long-winded way of saying that people have values that are more important than financial gain.

I guess I'm interpreting wrong because that is obvious and there is nothing taboo about it (cultures will be different re. taboos anyway).

Think about it in terms of opportunity cost. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on something else. Saying "this is always more important than financial gain" in effect means "this is always more important than everything else". That's clearly a form of taboo - you're rejecting outright the idea of trade-offs between competing values.

The ironic thing about it is that it falls for the same trap that it criticizes others for. This is a classic example of having an idea, finding some data that supports the idea, then explaining why it could support it.

There's an old stereotype that people in poverty are lazy and unproductive by nature, and this reads a lot like a defense of that idea.

This is basically a false dichotomy. It doesn't really offer alternative explanations. I could say that statistics show that wealth is increasingly consolidated every year and the bar for being part of the elite is raised a little each year, including educational requirements, and I could just as easily support my claims with the same data.

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