How much buying power does this income provide for goods & services that the younger generation wants/needs to buy?
For example: Over the last decades housing prices, college tuition & stock prices have significantly outpaced the average inflation rate. Older generations could buy up these assets at a discount (at least compared to Millennials & Gen Z).
In the 1990s and 2000s, it was very rare to travel abroad - a Eurotrip or Japan trip was a once in a lifetime experience. Nowadays, my entire friend group in the mid 20s-early 30s have traveled to Europe and Japan multiple times, as well as further afield, and an Amex Gold or Platinum card or a Chase Sapphire is very common among 20 year olds now.
Travel, quality of housing, etc have all risen among our cohort compared to Gen X or older millennials at a similar age (millenial hipsters were living in Brooklyn in the 2010s because they were broke. Gen X grungeheads were living in CapHill/Mission in the 1990s because they were broke).
Gen Z is at most 25. Give them 5-10 years and they themselves will end up buying property, especially because a lot of Gen X parents and Boomer grandparents do help out.
The article also takes your point into account:
“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”
This is an important anecdote because it illustrates the stark divide between "making it" and "not making it" in the current era. The people who make it get unprecidented luxury but the people who don't make it live in slums.
People who "make it" often feel like their path was trivial. While people who haven't "made it" often feel like finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them.
It's easy to maintain your habits and it's extremely hard to change your life's course.
You're ignoring one of the biggest things in the divide between the 'haves' and the 'broke': many of Gen-Z are deciding not to have kids, despite the negative effects that this profoundly selfish act has on society. Much easier to live a luxury lifestyle if you're not spending $50k/year on childcare, buying an extra 500-900sqft of housing, buying food for an extra 2-3 people, buying a car with a third row, and buying a never-ending stream of car seats, clothes, toys, diapers, shoes, books, gadgets, etc.
These same selfish people will be angry when any break at all is given to a colleague do to family circumstances (daycare closed for the day? kids have the flu?), but will expect to be taken care of just like the rest of us when they get old, despite the fact that they didn't contribute any children into the labor pool to provide for that care.
Very selfless of you to have children you didn't actually want in order to improve the labor pool for society. Do you tell them you only had them to keep the economy running, or do you keep that information to yourself?
Expectations of "middle class" life have inflated.
We can afford a single family house with the picket fence - but it won't be in Fillmore or Brooklyn anymore, because they are now luxury neighborhoods.
We can afford multiple vacations, but it needs to be abroad, not the Catskills or Redneck Riviera.
We can afford to eat out, but it's not going to be McDs or fast casual - it has to be fancy and instagram worthy.
> finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them
Exactly.
A subset of Gen X and Boomers did very well in the 1980s-2010s. Their kids are Gen Zs who rail against boomers but will gladly take their parents help to buy a condo or townhouse in SF or Manhattan.
Intergenerational wealth is now a thing, and isn't going to change.
I'm sorry for people whose family is not in a position to, or chooses not to, help them, but I think it's always been pretty common (albeit not universal) for parents to support their offspring.
I agree, but I think a lot of Americans never had that kind of a strong family unit helping each other out.
Until the 2010s, it was fairly socially expected that you'd move out of your parents house at 18 and either find a job or go to college, and do all that on your own dime.
It was always a weird concept for me coming from an immigrant family where we all pitch in together to help each other, but a relatively large minority of Americans (maybe 15-20% actively chose not to) and a large majority (maybe 20-30%) didn't have the means to.
Based on what my American friends told me, I think it was only a couple of generations of Americans where that was true. Before that, Americans too had stronger familial bonds. No first hand knowledge though.
If you're in your 20s-30s, best case your grandparents grew up in the 1950s-60s - which absolutely wasn't a walk in the park, but the average American was miles away the richest person on the planet back then, and the "nuclear" family was the structure of choice (that's why it's called the nuclear family - 1950s techno-optimism a la Fallout)
On the other hand, if your family immigrated then the familial ties based system continued to exist.
American society now has the same kind of "me-me-me" mentality I see in Asia (both developed like Japan or Singapore, or developing like China and India), the Americas (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia), or Eastern Europe (Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc).
The only way to succeed in this kind of a society is to be ruthless. Most Americans are NOT. You even see that here on HN, with people complaining about educated Immigrants doing better than educated Americans.
You need to be ruthless in a low trust society, and it's the same now in the US.
People like to blame immigrants or the "other" but at the end of the day, society has specialized.
Either you build the skills to specialize, or you don't and wither away.
This has happened in every country from Japan to Jordan.
The difference is, lots of people in countries like Japan or Jordan still remember how actual poverty feels like, and will work their hardest to prevent something like that.
Most Americans have now grown up with 3 generations of surplus.
It was always the immigrants that did the dirty work and eventually assimilated - look at anti-Italian, anti-Mexican, anti-Japanese, anti-Armenian, anti-Jewish, anti-Slavic .... sentinment in the US.
Their kids eventually assimilate and also lose that ruthlessness.
>Either you build the skills to specialize, or you don't and wither away.
Or you can coast on the wealth built by the hard working generations before you and let the immigrants specialize and work hard while you rent seek them. This goes for people and for countries.
Traveling abroad can be cheaper than traveling in the U.S. Sure, you spend more money on flights than you might on gas, but you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand for what you might spend on 3 nights of accommodation in the U.S, and you can eat out for all your meals on $30/day if you're savvy
That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s, so the logistics around traveling abroad can be much easier. The increasing interconnectedness of the world has similarly provided much more exposure to the international world, while technology (including things like airbnb and google translate) have removed many of the barriers.
I don't think more "elder gen z" and millenials are traveling abroad because they're overall more well-off. Housing is much less affordable and I think this is part of the reason we're seeing a decline in birth rates.
> you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand
That's why I gave examples of Western Europe (London, Paris) and Japan (Tokyo).
The prices on arrival are the same as traveling to Austin or Dallas.
I love traveling to Thailand or Vietnam, but most American travelers aren't going there.
> That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s
Aka, higher disposable income compared to their peers in past cohorts.
This is actually a good point and something I don't think was brought up in the article - my parents had me in their 20s. I probably won't have kids til my late 30s.
London and Paris are two of the most expensive cities in Europe (maybe the top 2 if you ignore Switzerland) so I agree if you're talking about people going there.
But the majority of Europe is cheaper than the majority of the U.S. (think Greece or Spain or Portugal or even most of Germany)
Japan also is much cheaper to travel in than the U.S.
Personally most people I know who do international traveling have avoided London and Paris due to the high cost of travel.
True! And don't take my statement as an assumption against parenthood. It just requires good planning and maturity, and some people (rightfully) recognize they don't have the maturity needed yet.
“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”
The author is using a poor metric to compare. It is not the % of income spent on housing that matters, but the % spent per unit housing quality. If you compare a boomer and a gen Zer, both spending X% of their income on housing, what quality housing is that getting them in comparable areas?
My girlfriend's parents could each afford their rent on two shifts of waiting tables when they were young, and they lived in nice areas of San Diego. Trying that today will have you living in a bad area with roommates.
> Americans aged between 15 and 24 spend just 38 minutes a day socialising in person on average, down from almost an hour in the 2000s
I’m definitely on the introverted side, but I (Gen X) feel like I socialized in-person way, way more than 7 hours per week in my teens and early 20s and feel that was entirely typical.
By the 2000s, was under an hour per day typical? Most of that was pre-smartphone.
I think one problem is the real world has become so car centric that it creates two problems:
- Kids rely on parents for transportation. Which usually means structured activities like camps etc over informal socializing.
- Kids getting around in the outside world is dangerous. We were wondering if our kids and friends could walk to a nearby ice cream shop. I think this would be more normal outside the US, it here it requires crossing a few intersections drivers cut through to get around.
As such I’d hypothesize kids will retreat to social media and virtual tools to connect because the real world isn’t that friendly.
My sense is less that the world has changed to become more dangerous and more car-centric than it is that parents have changed to be more risk averse and started encouraging structured time for other non-practical reasons.
Miles traveled per person [0] peaked in 2005 and has been down ever since, but my and my peers' childhoods in suburban America in the 2000s was way more free range and unstructured than what I'm seeing among children in the same neighborhoods today.
Before we could drive we rode our bikes everywhere. Once we could drive some of us got cars, others made a habit of regularly borrowing the family car or had a shared "kids" car. We found ways to meet up, we made friends with kids who lived in our immediate neighborhood. We had the regular set of structured activities that were popular (some sports, band, orchestra), but hours per week per child spent on after-school activities that were organized by adults was very small among my friends (fewer than 2-3) relative to today.
And all of that was at the peak of driving in the US. The USA hasn't gotten more car-centric since then, but children have lost freedoms. Cars can't explain that.
Anecdotally, I had access to my family's car on a pretty regular basis unless my mom had specific needs for it. I was a hardcore introvert and took advantage of that way less than I could have, but it was explicitly available.
Probably they don't count in-person video games like Super Smash Bros. as socializing. That number sounds low as a millennial too - and the car-centrism wasn't a problem because it was normal to bike up each others' houses.
What is the "wealth" they have? I'm not clear on this: is it the fact that wages are rising and the workforce age is favoring Gen Z population? What is the richness?
“In America hourly pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13% year on year, compared with 6% for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest “young person premium” since reliable data began”
Usually this is rebutted with a reference to apparently skyrocketing housing costs, thankfully the author addresses this shortly after.
“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”
This aligns with my anecdotal experience talking with college students and new grads today.
> Usually this is rebutted with a reference to apparently skyrocketing housing costs, thankfully the author addresses this shortly after.
Does he, though? He only mentions how much gen-z is SPENDING on housing and education, not what they're actually getting for their money. Most gen-z I know have given up on home ownership, and those who did buy are buying some pretty shitty parcels at exorbitant prices. They're also choosing less expensive education options.
But the main assets that most people build from (housing and education) are either not there or less effective...
Right, buying an apartment in a big metropolis where all jobs are is often beyond capabilities of a single worker (mortgage aside). No matter the country even.
Perhaps boomers were able to do so before the age of 25, but that seems unlikely even for that privileged generation. It definitely wasn't so for any subsequent generation. Gen-Z isn't worse off on this measure.
I was surprised that the article talks about employment.
I expected it to be about the assets they hold.
The Nasdaq increased more than 5 fold over the last 10 years and more than 10 fold over the last 20 years.
If parents of Gen Z gave their children $100k and taught them portfolio management, most of them could probably consider retiring without ever working for somebody else.
>I was surprised that the article talks about employment. I expected it to be about the assets they hold.
Good employment opportunities give you the power to build wealth and access high QoL perks like remote work and more free time to live life, that previous generations didn't have.
Try not having good employment and see, you're not thinking about assets or complaining about a 2h commute to the office but about paying for food and rent.
According to Google, the average baby boomer has $1.2M in assets.
If they had given 10% of that to their newborn and invested it in software companies, the child would already be as wealthy as the parent now. And could focus on asset allocation.
Instead of spending decades with other stuff to then finally come to learn about asset allocation.
GenX are parents of GenZ. Older GenX started work in the early 90s and bought houses before the runup. Later GenX entered job market in dot.bomb and bought homes at peak of housing bubble (that was us, we are not rich).
Also some millennials entered the job market around the 2009 crash and it was brutal. It would set your career back years behind and it was a tough damage to undo later.
Yeah I entered job market right after dot.com crash and 9/11; GFC was definitely worse overall across all markets. I made choices based upon that time that i really wish had gone another way (mostly risk aversion since everything seemed dicey).
We definitely own a house and it’s not all terrible. But where we live house prices have probably doubled in 20 years; if we had bought 5 years earlier (when we were in college), we would have seen our home value quintuple.
I don’t understand the point of this post. Aside from missing the mark on who gen z’s parents are, the rest is nonsense. How would boomers have given their newborns (each!) $100,000? They didn’t have $1.2m then. Likely they didn’t have $100,000, especially liquid, at all. And now probably 1/3 to 1/2 of that average (and it’s only an average! Median could be much lower) is in home value, so they’re retiring on six figures of investments (and again, only on average!) which isn’t exactly great given that medical costs very much do not stop when you gain Medicare. Younger-side boomers about to retire with $1.2m total net worth are gonna spend all of what’s not tied up in housing (and maybe that too!), largely on medical and assisted-living care.
Yes and? Why are you repeating yourself? The average baby boome is much older as well. Time in the market beats everything. Gen Z is still young, also has time to build wealth. Especially if they later inherit their parents wealth when they pass away.
Seems this article hand waves the increased cost of living, education, and inflated wages.
Adjust for inflation and this generation will no longer appear rich.
Also, this article cites there are “6000 Zoomer chief executives”. I wonder what it’s like to have a 20 yr old as a CEO.
All my bosses/superiors/ceos have been decrepit old fools that need to be put out to pasture.
Maybe it’s the same thing except a having a heightened or elevated sense of arrogance. High risk tendencies, and maybe their anxiety runs the company. I would hope they are more calculating though.
> In 2007 the average net income of French people aged 16 to 24 was 87% of the overall average. Now it is equal to 92%. In a few places, including Croatia and Slovenia, Gen Zers are now bringing in as much as the average.
The oldest Gen Z are 27 in 2024, still very young but not exactly an unheard of age to be leading a company. Evan, Zuck, Bill, etc were considered pretty effective leaders at that point, but you’re right, their management style was certainly different from other CEOs.
It does beg the question though, where all the Gen Z founders? I earnestly cannot think of a single one. Anyone have a name that comes to mind?
> Gen Z is also grabbing power: America now has more than 6,000 Zoomer chief executives and 1,000 Zoomer politicians.
I can’t see most of the article—does it go on to qualify any of this? Or to compare it to other generations at same age? What’s the median size of the firm these “chief executives” run? What does “politician” mean? School board? Town council in a city of 1,500?
In general I’d like to see a lot more use of median through all of what I could read and what I’ve seen in this thread, and less mean.
I had the same question. I suspect it is the same issue that triggered re-evaluation of classical methodologies for controlling inflation: they are measuring inflation in a way that doesn't conform to your perception, normalizing salaries based on that inflation measure, and then comparing cohorts through time.
The biggest issue with this is that the zero point in interest was practically reached. The biggest influence of "inflation", the biggest cost that people have, is housing. To be "smart", inflation didn't consider the cost of houses--because that isn't what people would pay each month--but instead some weighted average of mortgage costs and rents. As house prices increased at rates higher than inflation, interests rates were dropped which keeps mortgage rising at a lower rate and this "keeps inflation under control" but obviously that cannot continue forever.
There were lots of people that objected to that measure of inflation. Now they bump the interest rate "to keep inflation under control", and suddenly young people cannot afford a mortgage anymore: the principal has been increasing above inflation over the years, and suddenly the interest rates also jump. You're double screwed. Add to that education costs, which aren't factored into inflation calculations but are becoming an increasing cost of life for the young, and here you are.
So to me, the economist is comparing apples and oranges here. The way we measure inflation isn't useful for this comparison between these cohorts.
Capital costs are a huge component in prices of many things counted in the CPI, like rent and mortgages. Wouldn't adding an interest component to the CPI double count interest?
A crude--but in this case useful--measure of inflation is just average house cost + average education cost. This is enough to understand the woes of generation Z because education costs and the costs of houses have been increasing by a huge rate and more and more of them require higher education, and then their parents are less and less able to help them with that education due to their own fights with inflation and (in America) that private education becomes more and more necessary.
Their salary to CPI ratio may be better than millenials at the same age, but that just isn't a meaningful indicator of purchasing power for the things they want to buy or for the reality of their financial situation (education debt).
The sticker prices for tuition have drastically increased, but scholarships & bursaries have kept pace, so the average price paid for residents hasn't exceeded inflation. For example, tuition at Harvard for anybody with a household income of less than $150K is $0. Average tuition has gone up drastically, but it is foreigners who are footing the bill. If you exclude foreigners, the deviation is greatly up but the average isn't.
And for housing, how do you accommodate for rising standards? The kind of cramped shared roomming that I used when I was 19 just doesn't exist anymore. The closest approximation is 4 people splitting a 2br apartment. That's less than what I paid, CPI adjusted.
You and I are really talking about two different cohorts, which emphasizes my point. Who are you trying to understand and how are you trying to understand them?
The article and I are talking about early career professionals (mid twenties) and I am trying to particularly understand the ones around me who are struggling to make a housing purchase in the near future. Also, I would never use Harvard as a rubric of average and your decision to use it as an example truly perplexes me. Instead I suggest you have to look at averages and not at isolated price points of particular colleges to understand the woes of a generation. From, https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32031/average-student-loan-de...
> From 1990 to 2013, the growth of student loan debt surpassed the growth in students, going from $24 billion to $110 billion per year, a 352% increase in loans. During that same period, the number of students borrowing increased by 40%.
That is far greater than inflation. The reimbursements may have also been increasing over inflation, but did not compensate the cost increase for the average person I am concerned with.
Standards are not rising. These early professionals will get smaller homes in farther away neighbourhoods for much more, if they could even afford them in the first place.
In the 1990s and 2000s, it was very rare to travel abroad - a Eurotrip or Japan trip was a once in a lifetime experience. Nowadays, my entire friend group in the mid 20s-early 30s have traveled to Europe and Japan multiple times, as well as further afield.
Travel, quality of housing, etc have all risen among our cohort compared to Gen X or older millennials at a similar age.
For an article in a magazine called “The Economist” you would think they’d know that wealth is net worth based on capital assets and cash reserves, not your income. The fact that hourly wages are rising doesn’t matter because costs are also up in equal or higher proportion due to inflation. The premise of this article is basically untrue on its face and more so when you account for the housing affordability crisis.
That said, this article is probably still true for some kids. I put together a custodial IRA for my teenager funded with a dollar-for-dollar match to her gross earnings while she’s underage and she’s a prolific saver too. She’ll graduate high school with a higher net worth than the American median, but that’s mostly because of the typical American debt load more so than the raw amount.
Since we are directly paying for her college we hope that this will guarantee her a decent retirement some day, which so many of her generation will likely never have.
Also for commenters saying Gen Z is the kids of Gen X, that’s probably true but many of us are older millennials (xennials) too. I am not quite 40 yet and my kiddo turns 18 this year. The oldest millennials are 43 right now.
Remnants contain salt, fat, msg and spices... The stuff that make things taste good... It is the part that makes stuff taste good. Without it the snack is rather bland...
IMO this it just a very bad hit piece. It's just picking whatever fits its narrative.
> The average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above the average baby-boomer at the same age.
Might be worth mentioning that this isn't inflation corrected. Oh and of course averages don't tell the whole story.
> Gen Z’s economic power was on display at a recent concert by Ms Rodrigo in New York. The mostly female teenagers and 20-somethings in attendance had paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket. Queues for merchandise stalls, selling $50 t-shirts, stretched around the arena.
That says literally nothing about the economic power of a whole generation.
> In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.
Aren't way more Americans up to 25 still living with their parents, compared to previous generations, because of the high housing costs? I imagine living with your parents is much cheaper than any other housing option.
> Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age.
Well, millennials had a worse start for sure, however what about home-ownership of other generations at that age?
> Gen Zers are also producing fewer innovations. According to Russell Funk of the University of Minnesota, young people are less likely to file patents than they were in the recent past.
I’m fairly sure that the first figure you referenced is still inflation adjusted. The average salary in 1975 was $7600; the math is pretty self explanatory.
This is really intellectually bankrupt, whether on purpose or not.
The main issue is that they're basing a large part of their claims on ZIRP-era data, but the economy (obviously) changed completely once the 14-year gush of money was turned off in summer 2022. For example, "Quiet quitting", which the article cites to support its argument, was only possible in the peak ZIRP period 2020-2022 and today is unimaginable. Really, I would expect The Economist of all outlets to grasp this.
Also, the article is very light on specifics, e.g. it says "Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s." OK, but how much? If it's a few percentage points or less, that's largely noise, but if it's a double-digit amount, it's a genuine difference. As it is, we don't know, so the "unprecedentedly rich" claim in the headline is unsubstantiated.
Besides this, a bunch of areas related to inflation and prices are handled sloppily. For example, the article says Zoomers are paying about the same percentage of income as previous generations for housing and education, but it doesn't look at the quality of either -- I wouldn't be surprised if Zoomers are getting less for their money (less square feet of housing, degrees with worse job prospects, etc.). Also, as someone who lives in a southern European country, I can tell you that plummeting unemployment numbers in places like this (they cite Spain's and Greece's in a graph) are due to people emigrating en masse in search of high-paying, year-round jobs.
All in all, my biggest takeaway from this article is to confirm my impression that The Economist today is intellectually sloppy and baldly makes arguments with weak or no evidence in support. I'd gotten that impression after having subscribed for a few weeks not long ago, and this article, which I might have written off as a fluke otherwise, cemented it.
"Back then pundits obsessed over ultra-young tech founders, such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Patrick Collison (Stripe) and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat). Today, by contrast, less than 0.5% on the Forbes list are Zoomers."
Pundits should be ignored. Perhaps we will now see auto-generated pundit BS. Because "AI" is trained an old version of the web where people believed this pundit garbage.
garbage article as one would expect from the economist, gen z is slightly ahead of millenials and gen x if you use the government inflation and unemployment statistics
the fact their graphs show boomers as poorer than X, millenials and Z at the same age tells you all you need to know
You're rejecting this article, and the entire publication because it doesn't confirm your current understanding? You're suggesting to switch away from common metrics because they don't provide the answer you expected?
That strategy won't get you far.
Of course, one article is a drop in the bucket. But take it for what it is, not reject it because it doesn't follow the narrative you have. People like the narrative of generational politics that is currently popular, but that's probably because it gives them something to blame that's easy to point at... yet the plot holes are massive and obvious when you open your eyes to them.
idk man I'm late gen X and did OK by being in the right places at the right times, but i see millenials & Z (my students) getting absolutely screwed by housing, education, transportation and healthcare costs. Inflation numbers are obviously understated, the government has a huge incentive to lie about it.
>the fact their graphs show boomers as poorer than X, millenials and Z tells you all you need to know
it's comparing income at the same respective ages and that is completely plausible. I'm a millenial, child of boomers. Both were lower middle class workers, I'm the first in the family to go to uni. This is a very common situation. I'm better off than my parents were at my age.Like, ask any parents of millenials what they had growing up in the 60s compared to what we had in the 90s and the education access I had compared to what they had.
People under 35 in the US own homes at only marginally lower rates than boomers. (something like 55% to 60%), meanwhile home size has tripled. When boomers were kids half of all homes didn't have washing mashines or vacuums. Homes built with air conditioning in 1975: 20%, today 90%.
You really think a millenial or gen z woman today in her 20s/30s with a degree and a job would want to trade that for being locked in a house without a job, any modern appliance and less space than she has in her flat?
> the fact their graphs show boomers as poorer than X, millenials and Z tells you all you need to know
Which graph shows that? All I see is employment, income, and wage increase graphs at the same stage of life for each generation. It says zoomers at 25 are wealthier than boomers were at 25, it’s not comparing their wealth in 2024.
So when you write it’s “all you need to know”, seems like you’re saying that the incorrectness of their methodology is self-evident, which isn’t that obvious to me.
Is your objection primarily based on disagreement with the inflation metrics they’re using?
That’s utter bullshit to the point where I suspect ulterior motive.
For “rich” you’d need to look at wealth not employment %.
The younger generations are miles behind previous generations on metrics such as age constant net wealth. eg look at the chart in this and contrast that with the economists take:
The chart you linked stops before it gets to the cohort discussed in the article. The youngest cohort shown is the 25-34 cohort in 2016 would have been born in 1982-1991 ("gen y"/"millenials"). The economist article is discussing the cohort born starting in 1997. It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
Fair point on data comparability. The trend (younger generations substantially worse off) is pretty clear though.
> It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
That seems comical optimistic to me. Between gig economy, covid and rising cost of living, unaffordable housing, college loans I struggle to see the young ones building rapid wealth all of a sudden. If anything id expect even worse than where that chart stops.
For example: Over the last decades housing prices, college tuition & stock prices have significantly outpaced the average inflation rate. Older generations could buy up these assets at a discount (at least compared to Millennials & Gen Z).