STAT FIGHT! Millennials make life choices out of order? Says who?!

We haven’t started a STAT FIGHT between millennials and everyone else in a minute, so I’m back to help you start shit at happy hour and/or dinner tonight.

Today we’re digging into an oldie but goodie—CNBC retweeted a two-year-old survey yesterday claiming people my age make life choices all out of order, and that’s why we’re broke.

You wanna go, CNBC? I’ll bite.

It ain’t my gen’s bad decisions, it’s D.C. policy shills calling themselves think tanks whose thinking is all wrong.

These “think” tanks analyzed government employment data and came to this groundbreaking conclusion: millennials who wait to get married before having kids earn more money. Apparently, more than half of millennial parents go for the baby before the ring.

Of course! As we get older and more addled by our vape pens, the excuses you have to make to dunk on us have to change too. First we were killing your favorite industry du jour, now we’re bad at planning parenthood!

So let’s slug it out. Are the think tanks right or just headline trolling? Here’s the fighting stats:

Specifically, 86 percent of young people who got married before having kids are among the middle or top third of earners. Just 53 percent who put childbearing first have incomes in the middle or top third, meaning 47 percent of millennials who have a baby first are considered lower income.

It’s not that having a baby first makes you poorer. Yeah, kids are expensive, as Julian will attest, but that’s not the how it plays in the real world.

What’s missing here is people who are likelier to earn higher incomes, meaning people who were born into wealthier families with social support networks, are in a better position to delay having kids until they’re married. They have better access to healthcare and contraceptives, and are generally in a better position to plan out their life.

Folks who are worse off are less likely to have flexibility in how they plan out their families.

Am I wrong? I think not, especially on think tankers whose parents got them into Ivy Leagues and cushy jobs.

But you bring it from here. Come strapped with these stats to dinner tonight, and start yourself a STAT FIGHT.

And make sure you zoom in on vape holding, AirPodded, nose-ringed millennial of old in the image above. These debates never change, do they?
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Reference:

– New report says millennials are broke because they’re making choices out of order (CNBC)

(Bonus points to millennials who can name the movie we reference in art above.)