Greenspun: Let's stop investing in our kids

I made this point under another parent: $300k includes opportunity cost. Adding four years' salary (even with only a high school diploma) to four years' $40k tuition and living expenses, $300k doesn't seem so farfetched.

Of course, that definition of opportunity cost neglects the pleasures (both intellectual and hedonistic) of spending four years on a campus rather than a job site.

I think, his parenting rights has to be taken back. He buys toys for kids used - which is very unhealthy. And he will not be able to buy cutting edge or very good stuff this way. No new books kids - Nope! Dad knows better. No new dress - nope! Dad has THE idea! In case of emergency he will not be able to pay for care for kids, unless he depend on government provided healthcare (do not get me wrong, I am "socialist" myself and I am pro-government-run-care), which unreliable, and does not cover many things.

My opinion - yes you have to try to live cheap life, but not by buying used stuff - somebody else, with not really cheap life bought it first, but buying inexpensive stuff and using as long as possible, till it falls apart.

3 roommates in a basement is only miserable living conditions when compared to the McMansions that people are moving into now. My dad grew up in a 3rd world country. His family would be considered upper-class within their city, and yet they had 10 children crammed into a couple rooms, geckos in their living spaces, and mosquito nets to keep away the malaria. And they got bombed out of their home by the Americans, and had to move up into the mountains, shit in the river, and use stones to wipe their ass.

I included waterbill and trashbill in my utilities estimates; I was basing it off what I paid for utilities when I lived with roommates in California.

Person 1, at least, didn't have a landline - he used his cell (still on his parents plan) or IM from work. Person 1 also did not have zero savings: he managed to save up $20K over 2 years. Remember, a typical grad student salary is about $20k/year, and he was living off $10K/year.

People who make $10-20k/year don't pay much in taxes. Many don't pay anything. That's reverse-income-tax land.

You have a point with clothes, but over the short term, it can be ignored. I'm still wearing some of my clothes from high school, 10 years later. And you certainly have a point about health care, which is the elephant in the room, though that will hopefully get better as Obama's plan phases in.

I suspect that Daniel Kanemann's research could be rephrased as "For a good life, you have to be making more than average." It's not coincidence that $60K/year is just slightly more than median household income in the U.S. I suspect that if he were to run the same experiment in Vanuatu - supposedly the happiest place on earth - he'd find that you need roughly $5K/year for the good life. That's just slightly over their per-capita GDP.

There's a difference between survival and a middle class lifestyle. For those of us who have lived poor at some point, it's a point of privilege to have all of these luxuries.

Even so, if you look at the lifestyle of a single person on 35k a year, it's vastly superior to that of someone in the 1980s in many aspects, with health care and real estate as major exceptions.

What this article does successfully through hyperbole is to remind us to add opportunity costs into evaluating the value of an education. Your quibbles about the obviously rough numbers don't subtract much from that key point. It obviously doesn't make sense to abandon education, but it also obviously doesn't make sense to pay $500k for it.

"That the current salaries of recent college graduates represent their probable average output over their lifetime." It doesn't represent that at all. It is saying that the value due to education can be roughly approximated by the starting salary. The gains from there are then more based on experience/work, not the education. Of course, you ignore the money made while you would have been in school. You also ignore the periods of unemployment.

"I don't believe that the complete value of the education is in its utility for the labor market." The fundamental question though is how much we should pay for it. I could read books, do "home work", and watch MIT lectures on the internet for a lower price. Many people are looking for ROI.

"That there is a reliable way to make a ten percent return on investment overseas." A rough number, but definitely too high. The world is over-invested anyway as a result of too much money having been created.

"And that the normal personal investment into a college education is really $300,000. This is anti-factual. It is probably also wrong that each marginal elementary schooler costs $200,000, but I can't say for sure about that." I don't think it says personal investment, the distributed cost counts too. It costs about 20k per year here for elementary school and 25k for high school, to be conservative. You don't need to look at the marginal costs here, because they are your costs.