A Boring Dystopia

I get what you're going for here but doing the actual numbers is quite complicated.

A hospital visit every 10 years... I'm assuming you mean something that is both ruinously costly in just literal healthcare costs, and then may also prevent you from working.

This is a realistic thing to take into account, but I don't know how to even bullshit estimate averages involved.

Could add lifetime costs of tens of thousands.. to millions.

For student loans, maybe you can bullshit a 20 year repayment plan on $75k with 7% interest as a ballpark figure for all those with student loans, even though a bachelor degree is less costly than a phd.

https://www.calculator.net/repayment-calculator.html?cloanamount=75%2C000&cinterestrate=7&ccompound=monthly&cpayback=month&cpaybackway=t&cyears=20&cmonths=0&cpaybackwayamount=200&printit=0&x=Calculate#payment-result

That adds about $200k in lifetime costs for an individual.

...

But none of this can get at the other problems of ... ok so you got your degree, but you can't actually find a relevant job in the field that pays well, or a disaster wipes you out, or your student loan payment keeps you from being able to afford a reliable car or live anywhere near the jobs are...

...and the nature of career trajectories is that you have to have no setbacks to get to that high income at the end of your working life to pull up the average to account for your lower starting wages.

Its all compounding. The luckier you are early on, the less you have to do later on. Unlucky early on? You're basically fucked and will never escape the poverty trap.

That's more of an income or class mobility question, and well that situation is getting worse and worse as well. For an increasing amount of people, the costs of being poor (financial, medical, mental, crime victimization likelihood, etc) make it more likely to fall off an upward trajectory, or just never get on one to begin with...

...AND most employers will do literally anything they can to avoid actually raising your wage, they'll list bullshit ghost job openings that are entirely fake or are actually just going to be internal hires, or have utterly absurd experience requirements.

Empirically measuring lifetime income mobility can really only take place when a generation is near the end of that generation's working life, but there is a strong connection between current income inequality and future degradation of income mobility.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617

Bullshit, napkin math style extrapolation of this trend would put the % of kids that earn more than their parents at roughly 20% to 30% by 2020.

Basically, we live in an ossified class system society: Only about a quarter of people can currently afford to live the material 'American Dream' of owning a home, having a family, decent job, new car... and only a quarter can realistically live the apsirational 'American Dream' of simply doing better than your parents.

...And its just going to get worse, barring a bevy of reforms and government programs which seem utterly politically impossible with roughly half (more?) the country still earnestly believing we live in a meritocracy when we very, very obviously do not.

Visiting your doctor every ten years feels wild to me. I go at least a couple of times a year, mostly due to minor things but it's always reassuring to have a check.