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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Millennials in their 30's have something crazy like 1/6th the wealth their parents did at the same age.

This cannot be accurate in any absolute sense. How is wealth defined in this context?

25 years ago, the median car and house didn't have (central) A/C. Cell phones and the Internet were expensive and not widely available. Truly portable laptops, usable tablets, and smartphones didn’t exist. Health food options were limited. The world was not mapped for all to access at street level. Translation was far more difficult. Information was less accessible—Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist. Free public preschool (4K) was uncommon. The death rates and crime rates were higher, life expectancy lower. Cash and checks were the primary payment methods. The list goes on and on.

Does wealth here refer to an individual’s relative share of contemporaneous wealth? Should the generation that built all of the great technology and systems of the past 25 years not reap the benefits of their work?

I’m in my 30s, btw, in case I come across as defensive in this comment. It sounds like my parents’ generation did a better job of building lasting wealth than their parents did (though not my parents lol). Should we find fault in that?

This is pretty well documented. The main point is that older generations had access to much cheaper housing, they bought it instead of rented it, and it went up in value. Millenials by and large rent instead of own, and the rent increases have been outpacing wage gains for a while. Along with housing, education has vastly increased in price increasing student debt a lot, which was basically non existent in my parents generation. Medical expenses have grown an extreme amount relative to inflation as well as childcare. The net of it is that your boomer uncle can buy a new boat for the lakehouse he bought 30 years ago, but you're spending all of your money on daycare.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-century-pric...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-than-5p...

And there is no such thing as a guaranteed job, or job for life. My parents are boomer generation, and their friends insist that their kids are too lazy to work and should just march into a business and speak to the boss for work.

The world doesn't work like that for the vast majority. Hell, I worked in a software role for 10 years and it took me 2 years to find a non contract, full time role elsewhere. I applied for hundreds of jobs, with university education and experience, and got a handful of responses.

The economy is set up so a minority of people live in heaven while everyone else is treated like an expendable cost centre.

>> In 1989, when baby boomers were around the same age as millennials are today, they controlled 21% of the nation’s wealth. That’s almost five times as much as what millennials own today.

This doesn't seem to document OPs claim of mililians owning 1/6 of what their parents did.

When the boomers were 30 there people didn't live as long, so there were fewer old people to own things.

I'd like to know how much milinials own in absolute terms compared to the boomers.

Did more millennials also opt to live in city centers, which had hollowed out during the previous generation? You can still buy suburban and rural housing for $1xxK, or even five figures if you’re willing to compromise.

I just looked, and room+board at OSU costs $13,352 per year (http://undergrad.osu.edu/cost-and-aid/basic-costs). Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than it cost 20 years ago. Of course, unsubsidized private or out-of-state schools will cost far more. Many fewer people went to college 40 years ago, too.

The health insurance premiums are higher now, but the coverage is far better. Everyone can have guaranteed health coverage via ACA, subsidized in cases of financial hardship.

Free childcare is still available for many of those who live close to family. Maternity and parental leave and FMLA laws have only improved. Free public schooling generally starts earlier. More wfh jobs are available today than ever before.

My point in all of this, of course, is that I suspect a lot of these differences boil down to optionality and different decision making. I don’t think it’s reasonable for our generation to pursue a more exciting, leisurely, and expensive lifestyle than our parents had (prestigious school, expensive city, travel, white collar job, moving away from a childhood home, delayed commitment), then resent that generation’s boat and lake house.

Can you have it all today? For most, the answer is still no, just like it always was. I suspect that more people than ever before can get pretty close, though, leaving those who can’t even more resentful about it than in the past.

BTW, with one month of SF rent, you can buy yourself a nice used boat. A couple years of that rent will buy you a simple lake house.

Rents, education, childcare costs, and healthcare costs have been rising everywhere, not just in city centers. OSU is way more expensive than it was 20 years ago. My mom graduated from OSU in the 80s and paid for her self with a summer job working retail, you cannot do that now. Most flagship state universities now cost 35k+ for in state residents, and they used to cost 5-8k for in state residents. They have increased tuition expenses because the state legislatures cut funding during the great recession. Today a much larger portion of the cost of state uni education is borne by the student and less is borne by the state. Maybe 20 year ago, for some people it made financial sense to "opt out" and move back near your parents, and with the rise of remote work, it might make sense today for a small slice of workers. The large majority of millenials do not, and never will work at jobs that can be done remotely. They include huge industries like medical staff, retail, home healthcare, food service, etc.

The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.

citation needed. I highly doubt that this is true considering my (millenial) grandparents are still alive.

> The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.

I dug into some demographics data and I'm almost certain this is false.

OP said millennials in their 30s. Life expectancy hasn't increased in the USA that much since the 70s. Even if the deaths were completely distributed among adults, you'd expect people in the 30s now and the 70s to have about the same number of parents alive/dead. More importantly, almost all of the increase is due to improved child mortality.

There's a much simpler explanation: Boomers were once-in-a-country's-history lucky. They inherited the spoils of two world wars.

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