The fed numbers on their website only go back to 1990. In 1990 the oldest boomers were 44 and as a group they had 21% of the wealth. In 2023 the oldest millenials are 43 and have 6% of the wealth. When the oldest GenXers were in that low 40s age range they had 10-11% of the wealth.
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And Millennials are probably way more likely than Boomers were at that age to have two incomes in a household, are better educated, and probably work more hours and are on call more hours (via text/email).
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i kinda wanna run. there’s no one on D side now really
Not to be a Reply Guy, but I’m not sure what to make of that chart. Younger people who have just started accumulating wealth are always going to have the least amount of wealth. It’s hard to say how much of this is a deviation from previous eras.
I mean we have the data from the previous 3 generations. At this point elder millenials are in their late 30’s early 40’s and telling us that we’re the younger people who haven’t started accumulating wealth is feeling pretty gaslight-y.
I’m sorry that previous generations don’t like the implication that younger generations have it harder than them. There’s a good reason for that, it’s because they’re the first generation in a long time to leave their kids a worse situation than they inherited. They should be ashamed so denial isn’t a super big surprise.
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I agree with the conclusion, but I don’t think the chart is convincing.
Maybe it’s better for the hot take thread but Im not entirely sold on the idea that boomers are systemically wrecking millennials lives or even that millennials inherently have it as whole have it obviously worse than other generations.
I mean boomers were going to segregated schools, building shit out of asbestos and sweating getting drafted into Vietnam.
Currently about 50% of folks over 65 voted against trump last election. The idea that boomers are some almost universally evil monolith living entirely cushy lives seems so simplistic
On at least the economic side, I think this long-form Michael Hobbes piece from 2017 makes a convincing case that, yes, millennials are worse off than their predecessors:
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Yeah I have no argument about pure economic stuff, that is just an objective numbers game but I think that is just one part of the consideration. But even that I believe is at some level a victim of fate type situation as opposed to boomers as a whole volitionally victimizing us. Like obviously lots of boomers have done tons of terrible shit but that has been the case for all of human history
Almost every thing the boomers have voted for and supported has enriched them at the expense of future generations. George Carlin was extremely right about them.
We’re obviously speaking in macro terms here. There were plenty of Boomers who didn’t and still don’t suck. But they were brutally outnumbered and the cohorts main trait is an extremely distinctive indifferently optimistic (the world will get better because that’s the trend I don’t personally have to do anything to improve it) self centeredness.
And they’re frauds. They claim the social advances of the Silent + Greatest generations (Hippy culture was in the 60’s when there were still members of the Baby Boom generation being born. The Civil Rights act was passed in 1964, I’m sure tons of Boomers had input on that) and the technological advances of the one after them. I even think they’re frauds about art and music. They aren’t hippies and the Beatles they’re yuppies and disco.
I really do hate them. Born into a time of incredible opportunity and instead of carefully stewarding and continuing to build they decided to sell society one piece at a time for cheap luxuries. Yes you can easily blame the elites for all of that, but the elites of any era are a reflection of the larger culture and from top to bottom the Boomers were extremely lacking in almost every virtue and overloaded with nearly every weakness.
A soft generation that will go down in history as the people who most likely collapsed the worlds largest empire out of sheer laziness.
Oh and it shouldn’t need to be said but I’m almost exclusively talking about white Boomers here although I’ll be honest even Boomer minorities don’t wow me at all.
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I mean pence was on primetime cnn during the trump debacle saying “maybe we should continue to fund ss by eliminating millennial retirement because they already believe they’re screwed anyway, nothing lost” while wolf nodded while seemingly deep in thought. they’re taking/took everything and every single media cycle since 2004 has blamed millennials for something they usually have no control over. it’s a prolonged and aggressive victim blaming campaign from every single place of power and when you look at who the sources of that power are it’s always a boomer.
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jesus christ
Yo I fucking love these weird little hippie enclaves in the Midwest. Like, the town newspaper of Cedarville, Ohio has made the editorial decision to call these cats “community cats” instead of the more problematic term “stray cats.” That is subversive on so many levels.
Do not worry about why all these feral cats are converging on a small town in Ohio. It is not a creepy Steven King sort of situation.
This x100. We could argue nuances over what percentage of them voted for what, and how much of it was intentional and willful versus ignorant and short-sighted, but the end result speaks for itself.
They’re also frauds in that a ton of them who are anywhere from somewhat well off to very well off think it’s for a reason other than luckboxing the decade/country/race they were born. They think it was hard work and intelligence, and that if Millennials aren’t enjoying the same success we must be catastrophically lazy.
My Dad’s first car was a '69 Camaro, they went for about $3,600 new. He made like $15K or $18K or something like that with no college degree or training. That’s four or five Camaro’s worth of income a year. The base model is now $25,000. How many people are making $100K to $125K a year with no degree and no training?
Could play the same game with everything from housing to food to entertainment costs.
The elites basically offered them the marshmallow experiment over and over and they gobbled it up every time, then they gobbled up their kids’ marshmallows and so forth.
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My father is like the case in point here. Middle class boomer who spent too much and made catastrophic financial decisions. Never anywhere near a top 10% salary. Probably somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles his whole career. A reliable Republican voter, even though the tax cuts didn’t benefit him because, “At least somebody gets a tax cut. The Democrats never give anyone a tax cut.”
This man voted against his and his family’s self-interest his entire life. The reasons ranged from tax cuts to hawkish foreign policy to immigration to now anti-wokeism. He knows the world is fucked up, he knows my generation is getting fucked, and all he can say is, “Thank God I won’t be around to deal with any of that.”
He’s also always been for reducing the national debt, even while voting for the party that gave tax cuts (but not to him) without cutting spending. Like, just completely full of shit at all turns. I’ll have my cake and eat it too and I’m gonna dine and dash when the check comes. That’s the Boomers in a nutshell.
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Thinking of this while reading this very good NJR article about the Chicago mayoral election:
I hope Johnson succeeds.
Yeah this is graph is what I was wondering about and that is pretty 
Guess conceivably will be a big transfer as boomers die but who knows
So much in there that’s relevant here but this is an example I hadn’t seen before:
Trade groups have responded to the dwindling number of secure jobs by digging a moat around the few that are left. Over the last 30 years, they’ve successfully lobbied state governments to require occupational licenses for dozens of jobs that never used to need them. It makes sense: The harder it is to become a plumber, the fewer plumbers there will be and the more each of them can charge. Nearly a third of American workers now need some kind of state license to do their jobs, compared to less than 5 percent in 1950. In most other developed countries, you don’t need official permission to cut hair or pour drinks. Here, those jobs can require up to $20,000 in schooling and 2,100 hours of instruction and unpaid practice.
Wonder how many people take out loans to pay for training for jobs that didn’t require training 50 years ago? And how much interest gets generated?
Here’s a great story about how the rich are so wildly out of touch, and of course he was a Boomer. This guy at the poker table yesterday was talking about how wild inflation’s been. In his defense, zero mention of Biden whatsoever. Just a “This is crazy!” kind of take. In my mind I’m expecting like food prices or energy prices or something like that. No, travel prices.
Rich guy: “I’m taking my wife, my two sons, and their girlfriends to Italy this summer and the prices are insane. I can’t believe there are many people who can pay them! Hotels in Rome, and nothing fancy just normal city hotels, are $1,000 a night! And in Capri, it’s $1,500. Our trip, and it’s six people, but still… is going to cost $85,000.”
Me: “Well, it seems like right now there’s not much middle ground. There are people who can afford basically any travel and the price is irrelevant, and there are people who can’t even dream of traveling. So the prices can skyrocket since people will pay them.”
Him: “Well, I guess I must be in the middle, then.”
I’m trying to imagine being able to drop $85,000 on a vacation for six without flinching much other than to whine about it at the poker table, while still thinking I’m not rich. Unreal.
He went on to talk about how he’s spending $7,000 on his flight alone to fly business class. He says that if his sons want trips like this for their significant others, they should put a ring on it.
Me: “Have you seen ring prices these days?”
Him: “I don’t care, paying for those isn’t my job it’s theirs!”
Of course I checked, you can get a four star hotel in Rome for $100 a night. Granted, maybe not near the touristy stuff. Near the historic centre, you can get a four star hotel with an 8/10 review for $187 a night. Direct economy flights as low as $1,100 round trip.
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