None of these net worth calculations of poor people make any sense. If I take out $100k in loans to get an education, the wealth of the world has increased, but the only thing that's recorded on the ledgers of net worth is that I'm $100k in the hole.
You're not getting my point. Education itself is a form of wealth in terms of increased future earnings; otherwise few would pay for it. That wealth doesn't show up on anybody's balance sheet because it's hard to measure, but it still there. When some millennial says they have negative net worth due to student loans, they're not accounting for the positive value that their education affords them due to the fact they can do skilled labor.
Look at it this way -- if a company A has an EBITDA of $20k/year and company B has an EBITDA of $40k/year, the MBAs will have no problem assigning values to these companies. And companies can increase their earnings by going into debt such that their net worth as measured by these calculations can increase. But substitute a human in, and suddenly everybody has negative net worth.
