McFarland is on the starting end of Generation Y, the cohort born in the United States after 1980 that is typically portrayed as saddled with massive student debt, underemployed and underpaid. More than a third of the 80 million group of so-called millennials live with their parents, according to the Pew Research Group.

But McFarland is part of the sizeable minority that is doing quite well: 12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000, according to the Ipsos MediaCT's Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. Many of them, in technology fields, live frugal work-based lifestyles and are not saddled with the six-digit student debt held by doctors and lawyers.

Paul Campos researched this statistic and discovered where it came from:


The source of the wrongheaded statistic appears to be this: the cited survey claims 59 million Americans live in households with incomes of $100,000 plus, and that 20% of “affluent consumers” are in the Gen Y cohort (this appears to mean that 20% of the adults who live in households with $100,000+ incomes are of this age). The story’s author then did some very bad math to generate the claim that “12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000.” 
But that is totally different than these people making > $100,000 per annum.  That could also be people who are utterly unemployable living in their parent's basement. Or a trophy wife/husband of a hedge-fund billionaire. Or it could be 5 young adults sharing a house together, all making $22,000 a year as Starbucks' employees. 

At the very least it uses a highly no-representative sample and portrays the wealth of young adults in a completely misleading way.  This does not add to the conversation and it appears in the New York Times.  If only they had a prominent economist on staff who could consult over this type of data . . .