Young Americans Give Up

If you know any young Americans making their way into adulthood, you know some of them have given up. They won't be living better than Mom and Dad. They're not able to have a family because it's too expensive. They'll never be able to pay back their education loans. And in this case, they won't be able to get rich:

Young Americans’ incomes are depressed, their retirement nest eggs are microscopic, and their rate of employment is weak. The trend lines aren’t promising, either, which likely explains why there’s no shortage of pessimism out there.

Do you feel for them? Maybe they're your children. Maybe they're you. Depressing, isn't it?

But wait, they're young, these Millennials. And that means they've got years to right the ship, right? And, leave it to an economist, there's a simple formula they can all learn to cheer themselves up:

One thing millennials do have in their favor, of course, is time. Modest economic expansion that exceeds population growth “is more than enough to support a higher standard of living for our children over time,” says Gus Faucher, senior macroeconomist at PNC Financial Services.

Yeah, that's the ticket. Get out your calculator. You too can do the math. Such brilliance! Your variables: population growth, economic expansion. The rate of the latter exceeds the rate of the former and - voila! The prospect of prosperity returns to these poor kids.

Hold your horses. Is our economist relying on economic growth at a reasonable clip to save the day here? Question: When was the last time we had such expansion? It's been a while, hasn't it?

But no worries. Look at our variable again. If the economic expansion doesn't cut it, we just need to reduce the population growth. Better still, reduce the population. Why not? After all, the youngsters already believe they can't afford families. Go with it. Don't have kids. De-populate. Do that and you'll get rich, after all. Guaranteed.

And thus we see the perversion of thinking in our age of un-reason.