Millennials Control Just 4.6 Percent of US Wealth | Hacker News Reader

Millennials Control Just 4.6 Percent of US Wealth

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40 pointsadham0119 comments

This reads as machine-translated, if not machine-generated. Individual paragraphs contain errors and awkwardness that looks like bad translation, while the overall structure seems meandering, like a not-great machine-generated piece. What's up with this source? (the actual content matches what I've read elsewhere for years now, re: declining same-age proportion of national wealth with each post-Boomer generation, but the presentation, oof)

It is/was. The OP is a serial content thief and was flagged just the other day for it again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509445 - theyve been stealing/rehosting content for years on various blog sites and mass-spamming reddit with clickbait articles like this.

This looks pretty natural, and inheritance has a lot to do with it. Boomers are still alive, and therefore controlling their wealth. When they pass, any inheritance would usually go to their children, who would be generation X(or millennials to a lesser degree), and so on and so forth.

When you compare the % share of wealth across generations when they were the same age, millennials are on track to own significantly less: https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1198703644721524744

To own significantly less, or to own a smaller proportion of the whole?

There are far more Boomers than Millenials. Of course Boomers are going to have a larger "share" of U.S. wealth (compounded by the fact that Boomers are at the ends of their careers, in their highest-earning phase).

Here's an article [0] that looks at wealth per capita by age (and inflation adjusted), rather than by share. It shows that Gen X is doing much better than the Boomers (which matches my experience--my siblings and I far out-earn our parents), and that Millenials are on track to do the same but just aren't as far along the curve yet.

[0] https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-w...

I feel like inflation does a really bad job at adjusting for everyone's major expense: housing. It feels like gaslighting every time someone tries to tell me how fine millennials are when we objectively don't have the same opportunities for easy effortless well paying employment that makes buying a house a very achievable goal relatively early in life.

Of course these are just my feelings and I don't have data to support it

"when we objectively don't have the same opportunities for easy effortless well paying employment that makes buying a house a very achievable goal relatively early in life."

I'm not sure where you got your picture of the 1970s and 1980s. "Easy effortless well paying employment" is not how most of my cohort would have described our jobs, particularly the "well paying" part. I'm not sure what relatively early in life is: before 30? before 35?

there are more millenials than boomers: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_living_adult_gene...

Is the average per capita really as useful as looking at the median per capita between generations? Also, millennials above the mean likely live in areas with higher housing prices.

Furthermore it is really hard to adjust for inflation over long period of times (especially when productivity has increased as much as it has in the last one hundred years).

EDIT: It looks like the same author of the above post also wrote about the median trend in the following post. However it looks like the original with the data this post is based on doesn't exist anymore...

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2020/09/30/ok-millennia....

Successor generations to the Baby Boom have had lower per-capita wealth at the equivalent life stages, which fully rebuts this line of argument.

Generation X (born from 1965 to 1980) came of age during the era of wage stagnation and growing inequality ushered in by the 1970s and ’80s. When the typical Gen Xer reached 35 in 2008, his or her share of the nation’s wealth was just 9 percent, less than half that of boomers at a comparable point in life.

Millennials haven’t hit the 35 mark yet — that won’t happen until about 2023 — but their financial situation is relatively dire. They own just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth. To catch up to Gen Xers, they’d need to triple their wealth in just four years. To reach boomers, their net worth would need a sevenfold jump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou...

https://www.attainablehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Ba...

Not true, unless you are counting dead people, who last time I checked don't have any wealth.

This feels really obvious to me. Of course people just starting their adult lives wouldn't have had a chance to build up much savings / acquired an inheritance. Naturally they'll buy a house and start building equity in it before investing a huge amount into the stock market. As they get older, retirement accounts and home equity will grow, leading to older people having more wealth.

An intereting analysis would be to look at what this looked like for different generations adjusting for age (what did savings for baby boomers look like when they were in their 30s?).

Millennials are turning 40 this year.

The first ones are, if you go by the popular definition of those born between 1981 and 1996. Others are turning 25 and most somewhere in between. There's a 15 year difference between the start and end of the "generation."

> Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

> people just starting their adult lives

"Millennials" were born between 1984 and 1991. A good portion of them are well into adulthood.

In 1989, those under 40 had 13.1% of total household wealth. In Q1 2021 that number was 6.0%. It seems 2009-2011 saw the lowest levels where it didn't crack 5%

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Is that normalized by the number of people under 40 in 1989 versus the number of people under 40 in 2021? There are a lot of baby boomers (first group).

More: Is it normalized by change in life expectancy? If you were under 40 in 1989, what was the probability that your parents had died and left you the money? What is the probability in 2021?

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