Bloomberg Asks: ‘Are Millennials Financially Screwed?’

By Mike Dang October 1, 2015

Here’s a video from Bloomberg talking to Millennials about their money. They “interviewed a creative pool of people age 18–35 in New York,” which, if you read that quoted phrase, clearly shows the problem with this video. Young, creative class types living in New York are not representative of the Millennial generation and people living across the U.S.

If you ask these young writers, dancers, musicians, artists if they think they’re financially screwed, yes, they will think so, because they are young writers, dancers, musicians, and artists. They are representative of a specific sliver of the Millennial generation. But if you want to get a good, genuine answer to the question of wether Millennials are financially screwed, go talk to some young teachers, bankers, public service workers, lawyers, medical professionals, office drones, and add them to your video maybe?

The accompanying article has this paragraph near the top of the story:

Living at home, or living away from home but depending on help from Mom and Dad, keeps many young people from learning how to manage their finances, says Vicki Bogan, an associate professor at Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. “You don’t have any ownership, any force to push you to become financially literate,” she says.

Yes, makes sense, but then the piece make no effort to tie that argument to the results from their very own poll, which shows that the vast majority of the Millennials they talked to receive zero help from parents, or just a little bit now and then:

In fact, the answers from this poll itself are very interesting! Like this one on how much of our income we try to save:

Perhaps I’m just annoyed at the editorializing! I would have much preferred just seeing the charts on their own.

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