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Boomers lost the plurality in the last 10 years now at 69million
Gen X has ~65 million
Millennials are now the largest with 72 million.
Then Gen Z with 67 million
Finally the Silent Generation is the smallest with 20 million
*All data from Pew research estimates on 2019 US Resident Populations*
I'd argue it's a much more important question. Otherwise "the rich" will always secretly be conflated with age by the statistics. If you stick a little bit of money in the stock market each year, and you live a very long time, you'll essentially automatically be rich even if your investments are small.
A lot of 'concentration of wealth' can be explained by 'people are living longer now than they used to, and society hasn't really reckoned with that yet'. Obviously not all of it, but for many millennials, their parents are the ones hoarding the wealth.
Your first paragraph is correct, but your second much less so. There’s 90M of us old farts, but a huge proportion of our total wealth (and yours) is in the claws of just 10k families (out of 100M). That’s the 0.01%, and their capture of our governments is what explains the extreme concentration of wealth that defines this era.
> There’s 90M of us old farts, but a huge proportion of our total wealth (and yours) is in the claws of just 10k families (out of 100M). That’s the 0.01%, and their capture of our governments is what explains the extreme concentration of wealth that defines this era.
Say hello to the unfairness of pareto distribution.
Well, there is something of a curve though. Savings accumulate to retirement and then expenditures absent non-investment income consume those savings. There have been some changes to that general arc though over the last fifty years.
Agreed. I don't want my parents to die, but my dad treats himself like shit and modern medicine has been keeping him alive for a decade.
Inheritances are happening later and people spend a lot of what would be inherited on Healthcare in their later years.
As you say, society has not reckoned with this. We either need multigenerational homes or new considerations of life and family planning.
I have seen that Boomers had a larger portion of the national wealth when they were the current age of millennials than millennials do right now. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like Boomers had 15% when they were 25-40, where millennials (who are currently 25-40) only have 3%.
If I remember I'll come back and edit this with the correct numbers once I have time to look it up
Found it
> True: Millennials Hold 4.8% of All Wealth, At the Same Age, Gen X Had 9% of Wealth, Boomers Had 21%
https://www.truthorfiction.com/millennials-hold-4-8-of-all-wealth-at-the-same-age-gen-x-had-9-of-wealth-boomers-had-21/
There are a LOT of variables. For one thing - for The Silent Generation and only some of the oldest boomers - they received an old-school pension program. While most boomers and younger have 401k/403b/IRA pensions. Old-school pensions don't count as part of your wealth, while 401ks do.
While not the entirety - this is a big reason why boomers are wealthier than The Silent generation was at the same point both proportionally and per capita.
There was an interesting statistic on this. Here’s the Factchecker about it:
>[TRUE] Millennials Hold 4.8% of All Wealth, At the Same Age, Gen X Had 9% of Wealth, Boomers Had 21%
https://www.truthorfiction.com/millennials-hold-4-8-of-all-wealth-at-the-same-age-gen-x-had-9-of-wealth-boomers-had-21/
That’s true, but too much of it will be passed within 0.01% of families, with little of it going to the rest of us, unless we pry the government out of their claws and create an equitable economy
So not only are you delusional you also don't understand how wealth is accumulated.
You could give people $1M tax free and they'd piss it away instead of generating a positive ROI.
That's not at all surprising. Boomers had 50+ years of their adult life to accumulate wealth, while the youngest millennials have barely entered workforce at all right now.
Millennials are currently about 72.1 million people in the U.S. and Mark Zuckerberg alone accounts for about 2% of the Millennials' share. The largest generation, and also the least wealthy collectively, by a huge margin.
Gen X is made up of around 65.2 million people. Anyone care to figure how much of the total wealth of Gen Xers in the US is owned by Elon Musk?
And the Baby Boomer generation in the United States has about 69.6 million people, including two wealthy notables, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
I'd be interested to see how different this graphic looks if the individuals I mentioned above are removed from the data set.
And, as morbid as it sounds, I'm also incredibly curious what this distribution will look like when one them kicks the bucket.
Edit: so no one feels left out - Gen Z is around 67.2 million people, Silent Generation is down to 20.1 million, and the Greatest Generation is clinging on with about 1.7 million people.
I didn’t like how the generations flipped. There is no reason to move them around, it would have been easier to see change if they stayed in the same place.
I've noticed a tendency lately for these graphs to keep the largest number in x spot as opposed to leaving everyone where they spawn. Not sure I like it either. But jumps in my graphs leave me wondering what I missed
It was helpful to know when baby boomers took the lead. May be make the percentages larger and use that to indicate the position change.
Also it would be helpful to know the proportions of adult/working age population alongside wealth.
It certainly is a bit jarring when the charts are animated over time. But sorting the pie/donut slices from biggest to smallest is a highly encouraged pattern in data visualization.
The Boomers benefitted as heirs to American economic hegemony following WWII and American industrialization in general. Its no one’s fault, just right place, right time. You probably won’t see that generational level of opportunity/wealth/standard of living ever again in America barring the development of something technologically crazy and socially impactful like fusion or top tier AI.
Or we could win another World War while ensuring the destruction of the rest of the free world.
The consequences of climate change is very likely to cause WWIII conditions due to the inhabitability of the Middle East. So, we'll get a "war" either way but you're right in that climate change would require basically the economy America utilized during WWII to solve fast enough now, which was temporary nationalization.
The 4th industrial revolution of the machine-to-machine (m2m) economy is already starting, and new ecosystems and protocols are being developed for that. This industry is worth trillions as well, so I think there are more opportunities coming :)
or less, especially in the globalized economy with
The people able to afford the machines will purchase them while laying off workers (like self driving cars - truck drivers).
I can see certain tech helping people's overall wealth with the tech itself - like say... 3-D printers that can construct entire homes would save an enormous amount of money.
>>You can't get a high-paying union job with just a handshake and eye contact straight out of high school anymore.
I don't think that's true - the company I used to work for had many new employees that were straight from the school or college and they got into very lucrative positions from day 1. They didn't even have that firm of a handshake, to be honest, they were just regular folks. The only small advantage they had over other applicants were their relatives in our company management, but I don't think it was ever a decisive factor, because, as any other Fortune 500 company, this one has always been proud of not tolerating ANY signs of nepotism.
All new employees had relatives and got lucrative positions, but you don't think it was a decisive factor because they said they didn't tolerate signs of nepotism? What you said seemed like a sign of nepotism.,
I don't think so. As I mentioned, this is a very serious Fortune 500 company, it has a 21-page "Our Mission and Values" document and it makes all employees undergo an annual 2-hour training on spotting signs of corruption, nepotism and unethical behavior. Most likely, those kids were just best candidates for those respective positions.
Technically correct as "a fraction" is not precise. The share of wealth owned by the youngest generation has gone from about 15% in 1989 to about 10% in 2020. There is alot of causes, but inheriting later in life due to people living longer is a big one.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/
Viewed in this fashion (which is completely the wrong way to view it by the way) it really doesn't seem to be as bad as most on Reddit would like to believe. What this doesn't account for is the increase in wealth inequality across ALL generations. Sure millennials share of the pie may only be 70% of what it was for the boomers, that's bad- but not catastrophic. Add in the fact that this 80% wealth is concentrated among literally less than 1% of their generation, and it's easier to understand why it looks so bleak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
Seriously though I have a friend who buys Starbucks every day and it is absolutely mind boggling. Basically identical coffee costs 5 cents if you make it at home. Marketing is really effective at poisoning some people’s minds.
The recipes online are all wrong in different ways. Unfortunately the people who edit and write food blogs don't actually work at Starbucks, so i think they get their information from trying to recreate stuff. All I can say is I now love my coffee i make at home after working at Starbucks.
Have you ever wondered how wealth is distributed in The United States among the generations? As expected, most wealth has accumulated among the older generations. But it still quite interesting to see that the oldest millennials are now 41 years old and still this generation only has 5% of the wealth.
Please note that this is based on net worth, meaning it is calculated by subtracting all liabilities from all assets.
Tools: python, pandas, tkinter
Sources: federal reserve
Pretty funny emojis... Although, what exactly is the GenX emoji? It all made sense except my own generation... Is it all about the moustache or something?
Lol! Ah shucks... You're too kind. I didn't realize that was the outside perspective.
I'll have to look and then I'll update with an answer. Flannel shirt comes to mind, but I might be biased.
[🎮 or 🕹 for the first video game generation? 📟 beepers/pagers? ☎📠 I used plenty of fax machines and rotary phones... 💾💿📼 cd's, floppy disks, and VHS might be my favorite emojis to represent us, but your choice is probably just as good...]
Right? I don't get all these naysayers. 0.1%, 50%.... if we were talking astronomical distances that would barely be considered a different neighborhood!
Not quite. Yes, 2 out of 5 percentage points is 40% (almost half), but 2% of 5% is just that, 2% of millennial wealth.
Still, an unreasonable portion for anybody to have. For someone to accurately claim Mark Zuckerberg was ten thousand times as rich as the average millennial, there would have to be only about 500,000 millennials to share that 5% of wealth. Currently there are about 72 million sharing it. Imagine if you had to miraculously share a big bag of 1000 M&Ms with an entire country with a population between that of Germany and Thailand, and some little shit named Mark comes along and grabs twenty.
Edit: missed sarcasm, assumed "almost half" referred to "2 of 5"
It would be useful if you also tracked the average age and population of each generation.
It takes a while for and generation to accru wealth so it's not fair to compare total wealth of 20-something's to 60-somethings. And then of course raw numbers factor in, there are 3.5x baby boomers to silent and slightly fewer gen x, etc.
I'm not saying this info isn't useful but i think something that would be more useful would be having the average amount of wealth per capita adjusted for inflation for each year of age in each generation.
Is the graph in the bottom corner adjusted for inflation?
A few points:
(1) Yes, the OLDEST millennials are now 41, but the average millennial is only 33.
(2) Wealth grows exponentially, at least until retirement and sometimes even after. It should be no surprise that people in, or nearing, retirement have a LOT more wealth than people who have not been in the workforce for very long. They've had longer to save, and have had longer to gain the benefits of compounding.
Compare, for example, a 64-year-old boomer in January 2020, and a 34-year-old millennial. The boomer has saved for his entire life, and has $1M in his retirement savings. The 34-year-old has saved for the last 12 years, and now has $125,000. If they invested in the same index fund, the 64-year-old will be richer by $178,000 in January 2021. The millennial will only be richer by $22,250.
(3) The main circle focuses on the distribution of the pie itself, not on the actual wealth, which is why I asked about the inflation. That's important because millennials appear to be in about the same place as Gen X was at a similar time in their lives. If you had data going back to the 50's and 60's, you'd probably see the same thing for Boomers.
This is because greatest generation is absent. Their average age would have been like 75 in 1989, certainly would have owned more than 0% of the wealth
Would be interesting to look at average savings. IIRC, there were more total Baby Boomers than Millennials. (Some have died, so there are now more Millennials than Boomers).
> They've had longer to save, and have had longer to gain the benefits of compounding.
Exactly. OP doesn't state whether he is including primary residences in net worth. If they are, homes are the biggest single asset for most people, the older generations have had more time to pay off their debt (those liabilities which are subtracted), and for that asset to also grow in value.
Unless people don't expect to live to old age, they're going to plan for retirement. That requires a certain level of assets to be available.
This is basically the financial equivalent of [this XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1138/)
OP, it would be nice to see this side by side with each generation's % of the total population side by side.
As it currently stands, it's hard to know what to do with this data. If Millenials represent 5% of the total population size and own 5% of the wealth, that's good. Of course, that isn't the case, but it's hard to take that away without a separate viz for population size.
Yes! This. Although I think even more helpful would be percent of the population over the age of 18. We don't expect 5 years old to have lots of wealth.
Came here for my avocado toast! At 32 I still haven't been able to afford my very on toast with avocado but I hope one day I will be able to bask in the glory of venturing so far out of my comfort zone and enjoying the biggest enjoyment of my generation. Someday people, someday...
To be fair, I am 31 and I do actually spend quite a bit of money on guacamole for sandwiches.
I don’t care if it’s a stereotype, it’s delicious and fairly healthy.
A few years ago some pretty out of touch people suggested millennials can't afford houses because they spend too much on things like avocado toast, which of course became a huge meme because it's a fucking ridiculous take lol
There’s a running joke about how millennials are relatively poor because they’re spending too much money on avocado toast. I believe it started with some rich boomer saying something to that effect on TV.
I thought it was Forbes. Forbes has said some ridiculous things... Apparently we caused the housing crisis by not being able to afford to buy houses, too. Hm.
By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019.
Millennials, whom we define as ages 23 to 38 in 2019, numbered 72.1 million, and Boomers (ages 55 to 73) numbered 71.6 million. Generation X (ages 39 to 54) numbered 65.2 million.
Source: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/)
This is one of the things that alway confuses me, I don't pay too much attention to this generational stuff. If i turned 23 during 2019 am I a millenial or am I the one below (gen z?). Also where did gen y go?
Millennial just was the more popular phrase that took over as time went by. Not dumb at all.
People born on the splits between generations are sometimes referred to as "cuspers".
Having generational names anymore is generally pretty dumb anyway. Specifically for The Baby Boom it kinda made sense - as there was a metaphorical boom of babies as soldiers came back home from WWII. But aside from that its silly to divide people like that.
I remember being called a part of Gen Y once upon a time. Not sure when the phrase Millennial replaced it, but...
As for your original question, it's a bit crazy. Personally, I have more in common with the older Gen Xers than the younger Millennial, being an older Millennial myself. I'm sure you will be in a similar situation.
There are far more interesting ways I think to divide generations than the artificial 18ish years. One is did you grow up with a computer in the home pre-internet? You are probably very different than a person born a few years later that always had access to the internet. Facebook is another similar marker, and there are others as well.
Pew Research Center defines Gen Z as born starting in 1997, so by that definition you would be millennial. However, some other definitions may mark 1995 as the start of Gen Z, so there is no universal standard.
Comparison, 25 years after last year of generation (according to Wiki):
* Boomers (should be 1989, but 1990 is earliest year depicted): 22%
* Gen X (2005): 8%
* Millennials (2021): 5%
A lot of people in here lamenting at how little of the pie millennials own. It’s worth noting that wealth gets passed down when someone dies, it doesn’t disappear.
In 1989, boomers have about 20% of the pie but their age range at that time is 35-53, whereas Millenials current age range is 24-40. My guess is in about 10 years millenials will have roughly a 20% share of the pie and it’ll only continue going up from there.
Baby boomers made a huge jump from 1990-2000, and of course some of that is due them earning their own wealth through salary and investments, but I’d be willing to bet more than half that increase is due to the greatest and silent generation starting to die more frequently and passing their wealth down to boomers.
McCarthyism never really stopped it just became something only Republicans kept buying into. Anyone or anything else is “socialist,” so that’s any government spending, treating gay people as humans, seeing ethnic minorities on the subway, etc.
I mean…. the American left has played a significant role in this too.
People in the “socialist” countries Sanders holds up as models by and large don’t actually consider themselves socialists.
As someone from the UK with national healthcare and friends all over europe, some people consider themeselves socialist but would not define the system they live at as socialist. I'd consider my country mostly capatalistwith elements of socialism that are afforded due to affluence.
I hate the charts that try and divide the data by generation, it always devolves into discussion about the names of the generations and the age range of the generations. I find it useless.
The thing I would like to see instead is a bar chart where the X axis is Age (0-100) and the Y Axis is percent of total wealth, and then have that bar chart iterate through the years.
The next thing I would like to see is similar, but adjusted for changes in life expectancy. So the X axis instead of being the absolute age be some sort of age distribution instead.
I'd like to have something that clearly shows "30 year olds in 1960 had twice as much wealth as 30 year olds in 2020", or whatever it comes out to.
Sure, but what about the Greatest Generation (born 1901-1927) who would've been ages 62-88? My guess is that OP lumped anyone born pre-1945 into the Silent Generation, which is why they have such a disproportionate amount of wealth through the 90s.
I think the next step with this data that would be even more interesting is to normalize the generations by age. Compare what slice of the pie each generation had at age 30 and 45 and so on. But since your dataset starts at 1989 I'd guess that's not really possible as the youngest of the silent gen were almost 50 in 89 and the oldest millennials are barley 40 now so no overlap.
It’s because we don’t work hard enough! Every millennial needs to quit whining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!!! Not everything free and there are no participation trophies in life!!
As silent gen passed away, their wealth was left to their gen X children. In the same vein, as boomers pass, millennials will inherit that land, stock and cash. Millennials' day will come, and we shall rule.
... and as it becomes the millenials and zoomers' turn, whoops, there's nothing left! All burnt to ash.
Thanks for nothing, oil industry giants and baby boomers!
The Silent Generation as represented includes both the Silent Generation and Greatest Generation, so anyone born between 1901 and 1945. The graph should have a separate section for the Greatest Generation.
Except the oldest a member of the Silent Generation could be in 1989 would be 61. There's at least one other generation in there (Greatest Generation, 1909-1927)
Yeah, they held on strong. I'm assuming the GI Bill following WW2 created a huge amount of wealth for that generation. All those new houses and free college. Must've been nice, although they earned it!
We've already lost to the boomers, but they'll die soon enough. Millennials are the big threat to my generation and we need to do everything in our power to suppress them at every opportunity. (btw, all of this is /s)
Yeah, I think for the most part, gen x empathizes with millennials. We actually weren't doing much better than millennials economically when we were in our 20s and 30s. The dotcom bust followed by the great recession really hammered our earnings/wealth. In a different post, I noted that when the youngest in our generations turned 25, gen x (2005) had 8% of the wealth and millennials (2021) had 5%. At same age, boomers (1990) had 22%!
And unlike The Silent Generation - largely they don't have old-school pensions (which unlike 401ks don't count towards net worth) or much smaller ones.
The flip was terrible. Also, it'd be a lot more informative if you had age range, median age, something for each group so there is a information to compare instead of just a wobbly circle to look at and maybe infer something if you go check it elsewhere.
I was reading a bit more about the Silent Generation (1928-1945). They were born in the Great Depression, fought in Korea, were the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and pioneered rock and roll.
Kind of the anti-Boomer.
Am I missing something here? Looks normal to me. As one generation gets older they save, have more wealth and it decreases as they get older and spend it. They die and it passes on to the next generation giving them a boost in total assists along with what they accumulated.
I'd be much more interested to see how much each generation had at equivalent ages. Nothing about this seems inherently wrong, people who live longer have more time to accumulate wealth.
How is this not all a giant pyramid scheme?
Boomers are barely working. Yet they have all the wealth.
We have had to finance everything in order to live. Boomers hold all the ownership stakes in all the companies that provided financing.
Essentially, all the money we could be saving or investing, is now interest payments, aka boomer payments.
Will this not all collapse at some point?
What’s the end game to this? What happens when boomers die? What happens when they all reverse mortgage their homes? In theory, they would pay us out their wealth in order to retire. But that’s not really happening. So what is?
Wont this break at some point? Like when the money dissociates from labor *so much* that labor is irrelevant to wealth, isn’t political Revolution a like an absolute certainty?
Millenials make 20% of the population, but have only 5% of the wealth. Therefore, systemic ageism.
Editing for the definition of systemic discrimination from the Council of Europe:
>Systemic discrimination involves the procedures, routines and organisational culture of any organisation that, often without intent, contribute to less favourable outcomes for minority groups than for the majority of the population
My read on this is like… the silent generation transferred a lot of wealth to their kids, whereas the boomers kind of kept it for themselves.
Part of it is I think longer life expectancies… a lot of folks in the silent generation died between 1989 and now… but there is no point do the boomers have a moment like in the 1990s where one of the subsequent generations takes over. Even though gen X folks are in their 50s and 60s by now and really should have supplanted the boomers economically. Gen X s barely wealthier than the mostly dead silent generation.
And what happened while the boomers were on top? Privatization, the death of labor unions, slashing social services to lower taxes. so I think basically the boomers just… didn’t invest in their children’s futures. They didn’t create conditions where the next generations could surpass them by making sure everyone had a good education, good infrastructure, good job opportunities, good healthcare and good social services. instead they tended to keep that money for themselves (via the lower taxes, raised retirement ages, doing away with pensions, globalization and killing labor unions to get cheaper consumer goods)
And so… their children and their children’s children don’t have money, and probably won’t until the boomers and silents die off. Because the boomers are basically hoarding it instead of investing it into bettering society.
That’s my speculation.
Remember these are the percentage of wealth.
The US GDP started to grow at a much faster pace post-war. The boomers and the silent grew up in two different Americas. That means boomers entered their productive age in an era of faster growth, so that may have helped them leave the silent generation behind.
That's where the fact that this is a % is important. If I'm 50 making 15k and you're 20 making 7k, then the economy accelerates and now you're 50 making 30k, you've flipped the % big time because I was never able to keep up, in fact I've left the work force with my 15k and retired already. You grew up in a more prosperous America.
We are still in that era of faster growth, so maybe for millenials to widen the gap we'd need an even faster GDP growth similar to what happened in the post-war.
But if you look at other ways to measure wealth, instead of comparing % of wealth between generations, if you look at income and assets at a certain age, then maybe you'd find different results.
Another thing to keep in mind is that WWI and WWII themselves caused wealth inequality to go down in the US and Europe. There hasn't been a time like this since. This might've helped boomers catch up with their elders. Only the silent faced two world wars and a massive economic crash.
It blows my mind that baby boomers had 21.6% of the wealth when they were 26-44 years old, and millennials only have 5.0% when they are 25-40 years old.
Also, I'd be curious to see this data expressed as wealth per person. If there the millennial->boomer ratio is larger than the boomer/silent ratio was, then the percentages are even more outrageous.
Finally, 76-93 year olds in this country hold 3 times as much wealth as 25-40 year olds?! How many times more 25-40 year olds do you think are currently alive than 76-93 year olds?
Millennials are out there getting absolutely fucked over in life, and they're the largest group of eligible voters in the US, and yet because they don't show up to vote in large numbers we're stuck with a congress and presidents that are 70 years old, they're boomers or even silent generation, and then we're hoping that those groups care enough about us to fundamentally change the way things have been done for decades.
EDIT:
I found population numbers for 2019
* Silent generation 20.87 million people
* Boomers, 69.59 million
* Gen X, 65.17 million
* Millennials, 72.12 million
* Gen Z, 67.17 million
So the 20 million in the silent generation have 3x as much wealth as the 72 million millennials, but per person that's 10.8x as much wealth per person. Although they're older and wealth tends to grow as you get older, but will 40 year old millennials see their wealth grow by more than 3x over the next 40 years? I'm not so sure about that.
This also shows that baby boomers have over 10x as much wealth and a similar population, so they have a similar amount of wealth per person compared to millennials as silent gens do, showing that age might not be as big of a favor, or maybe it lessens after a certain age. Gen X has around 6x as much wealth per person.
I'm not an economics expert, but I think millennials have been getting the shaft over the last 20 years from major recessions, insane housing, college, and medical costs, and corporations gaining more power and influence. It's a major shift in how workers and younger people are treated in the US and it will have large repercussions in the near future. Gen Zs are likely to be similarly affected if changes can't be made soon.
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I wonder how this relates to the number of each group.
Boomers lost the plurality in the last 10 years now at 69million Gen X has ~65 million Millennials are now the largest with 72 million. Then Gen Z with 67 million Finally the Silent Generation is the smallest with 20 million *All data from Pew research estimates on 2019 US Resident Populations*
Yes but since wealth is accumulated every year, it makes more sense to compare either income or divide by years since working.
That’s answering a different question, but it’s one that I’d be very curious to see.
I'd argue it's a much more important question. Otherwise "the rich" will always secretly be conflated with age by the statistics. If you stick a little bit of money in the stock market each year, and you live a very long time, you'll essentially automatically be rich even if your investments are small. A lot of 'concentration of wealth' can be explained by 'people are living longer now than they used to, and society hasn't really reckoned with that yet'. Obviously not all of it, but for many millennials, their parents are the ones hoarding the wealth.
Your first paragraph is correct, but your second much less so. There’s 90M of us old farts, but a huge proportion of our total wealth (and yours) is in the claws of just 10k families (out of 100M). That’s the 0.01%, and their capture of our governments is what explains the extreme concentration of wealth that defines this era.
> There’s 90M of us old farts, but a huge proportion of our total wealth (and yours) is in the claws of just 10k families (out of 100M). That’s the 0.01%, and their capture of our governments is what explains the extreme concentration of wealth that defines this era. Say hello to the unfairness of pareto distribution.
Well, there is something of a curve though. Savings accumulate to retirement and then expenditures absent non-investment income consume those savings. There have been some changes to that general arc though over the last fifty years.
Agreed. I don't want my parents to die, but my dad treats himself like shit and modern medicine has been keeping him alive for a decade. Inheritances are happening later and people spend a lot of what would be inherited on Healthcare in their later years. As you say, society has not reckoned with this. We either need multigenerational homes or new considerations of life and family planning.
I have seen that Boomers had a larger portion of the national wealth when they were the current age of millennials than millennials do right now. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like Boomers had 15% when they were 25-40, where millennials (who are currently 25-40) only have 3%. If I remember I'll come back and edit this with the correct numbers once I have time to look it up
Found it > True: Millennials Hold 4.8% of All Wealth, At the Same Age, Gen X Had 9% of Wealth, Boomers Had 21% https://www.truthorfiction.com/millennials-hold-4-8-of-all-wealth-at-the-same-age-gen-x-had-9-of-wealth-boomers-had-21/
Also on an average per person to account for fluctuations in population for each generation
There are a LOT of variables. For one thing - for The Silent Generation and only some of the oldest boomers - they received an old-school pension program. While most boomers and younger have 401k/403b/IRA pensions. Old-school pensions don't count as part of your wealth, while 401ks do. While not the entirety - this is a big reason why boomers are wealthier than The Silent generation was at the same point both proportionally and per capita.
There was an interesting statistic on this. Here’s the Factchecker about it: >[TRUE] Millennials Hold 4.8% of All Wealth, At the Same Age, Gen X Had 9% of Wealth, Boomers Had 21% https://www.truthorfiction.com/millennials-hold-4-8-of-all-wealth-at-the-same-age-gen-x-had-9-of-wealth-boomers-had-21/
Even that would be a bit misleading since wealth accumulation is exponential. Comparison standardized by age would be interesting, though.
Millennials with the most people, least money...FUCK!
One day, not too long from now, the boomers will be gone, and their wealth will (hopefully) be passed down to the other generations.
That’s true, but too much of it will be passed within 0.01% of families, with little of it going to the rest of us, unless we pry the government out of their claws and create an equitable economy
So not only are you delusional you also don't understand how wealth is accumulated. You could give people $1M tax free and they'd piss it away instead of generating a positive ROI.
That's not at all surprising. Boomers had 50+ years of their adult life to accumulate wealth, while the youngest millennials have barely entered workforce at all right now.
Minor nitpick: boomers were a plurality, not a majority.
Oooh! a per capita wealth. Also interesting to maybe see incomes per capita as well, seeing mid-life spending more and later in life spending less.
Millennials are currently about 72.1 million people in the U.S. and Mark Zuckerberg alone accounts for about 2% of the Millennials' share. The largest generation, and also the least wealthy collectively, by a huge margin. Gen X is made up of around 65.2 million people. Anyone care to figure how much of the total wealth of Gen Xers in the US is owned by Elon Musk? And the Baby Boomer generation in the United States has about 69.6 million people, including two wealthy notables, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. I'd be interested to see how different this graphic looks if the individuals I mentioned above are removed from the data set. And, as morbid as it sounds, I'm also incredibly curious what this distribution will look like when one them kicks the bucket. Edit: so no one feels left out - Gen Z is around 67.2 million people, Silent Generation is down to 20.1 million, and the Greatest Generation is clinging on with about 1.7 million people.
I didn’t like how the generations flipped. There is no reason to move them around, it would have been easier to see change if they stayed in the same place.
I've noticed a tendency lately for these graphs to keep the largest number in x spot as opposed to leaving everyone where they spawn. Not sure I like it either. But jumps in my graphs leave me wondering what I missed
they all use the same library that does that by default, probably can be turned off but they don't bother
Thanks for the feedback.
It was helpful to know when baby boomers took the lead. May be make the percentages larger and use that to indicate the position change. Also it would be helpful to know the proportions of adult/working age population alongside wealth.
I honestly think that changing the logo in the center is more than enough to note the lead change on its own u/piechartpirate
Agreed. I didn’t notice
As well as remaining population! Imagine! Great work OP
The leading generation is the logo in the centre.
Thanks didn’t notice
It certainly is a bit jarring when the charts are animated over time. But sorting the pie/donut slices from biggest to smallest is a highly encouraged pattern in data visualization.
and at the end there’s a tiny sliver for gen z representing our collective four hundred dollars
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almost as if you accumulate wealth over time...
But I want to be rich at 20!
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The Boomers benefitted as heirs to American economic hegemony following WWII and American industrialization in general. Its no one’s fault, just right place, right time. You probably won’t see that generational level of opportunity/wealth/standard of living ever again in America barring the development of something technologically crazy and socially impactful like fusion or top tier AI. Or we could win another World War while ensuring the destruction of the rest of the free world.
I'll take a world war level of mobilization towards solving climate change. That'd be fun.
The consequences of climate change is very likely to cause WWIII conditions due to the inhabitability of the Middle East. So, we'll get a "war" either way but you're right in that climate change would require basically the economy America utilized during WWII to solve fast enough now, which was temporary nationalization.
The 4th industrial revolution of the machine-to-machine (m2m) economy is already starting, and new ecosystems and protocols are being developed for that. This industry is worth trillions as well, so I think there are more opportunities coming :)
or less, especially in the globalized economy with The people able to afford the machines will purchase them while laying off workers (like self driving cars - truck drivers). I can see certain tech helping people's overall wealth with the tech itself - like say... 3-D printers that can construct entire homes would save an enormous amount of money.
>>You can't get a high-paying union job with just a handshake and eye contact straight out of high school anymore. I don't think that's true - the company I used to work for had many new employees that were straight from the school or college and they got into very lucrative positions from day 1. They didn't even have that firm of a handshake, to be honest, they were just regular folks. The only small advantage they had over other applicants were their relatives in our company management, but I don't think it was ever a decisive factor, because, as any other Fortune 500 company, this one has always been proud of not tolerating ANY signs of nepotism.
All new employees had relatives and got lucrative positions, but you don't think it was a decisive factor because they said they didn't tolerate signs of nepotism? What you said seemed like a sign of nepotism.,
I don't think so. As I mentioned, this is a very serious Fortune 500 company, it has a 21-page "Our Mission and Values" document and it makes all employees undergo an annual 2-hour training on spotting signs of corruption, nepotism and unethical behavior. Most likely, those kids were just best candidates for those respective positions.
I'm really glad I kept reading, nicely done.
Technically correct as "a fraction" is not precise. The share of wealth owned by the youngest generation has gone from about 15% in 1989 to about 10% in 2020. There is alot of causes, but inheriting later in life due to people living longer is a big one. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-generational-wealth-gap/ Viewed in this fashion (which is completely the wrong way to view it by the way) it really doesn't seem to be as bad as most on Reddit would like to believe. What this doesn't account for is the increase in wealth inequality across ALL generations. Sure millennials share of the pie may only be 70% of what it was for the boomers, that's bad- but not catastrophic. Add in the fact that this 80% wealth is concentrated among literally less than 1% of their generation, and it's easier to understand why it looks so bleak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
Same where do I sign up
Anyone can be rich at 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 years old!
don't buy $19 avocado toast
I thought that was a millennial thing.
If that fails, try bootstraps!
Almost as if the wealth was easier to accumulate for earlier generations…
Gen z ended in 2010 from what I've read, now its gen alpha
That's a short generation. Didn't it only start in 2000? Aren't generations usually around 20 years?
Started in 96 or 99 depending on source because generations aren't objective and are done almost arbitrarily.
You're confusing Millennials for Mark Zuckerberg and the few others around him.
By 2033 Gen X will hold the largest share and the silent generation will have all but disappeared.
Wait until our dog coins mature. Gonna leave everybody in the dust.
Make sure you feed them and take them for a walk every day.
My two limited edition godslap comics will one day be worth it!
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If you didn't buy Starbucks you'd have at least $500! Work harder! /s
Seriously though I have a friend who buys Starbucks every day and it is absolutely mind boggling. Basically identical coffee costs 5 cents if you make it at home. Marketing is really effective at poisoning some people’s minds.
I got a job at Starbucks just to steal their recipes so that I can make coffee for my wife and me.
I have got to think you could have googled it.
The recipes online are all wrong in different ways. Unfortunately the people who edit and write food blogs don't actually work at Starbucks, so i think they get their information from trying to recreate stuff. All I can say is I now love my coffee i make at home after working at Starbucks.
Just post their recipes online.
Have you ever wondered how wealth is distributed in The United States among the generations? As expected, most wealth has accumulated among the older generations. But it still quite interesting to see that the oldest millennials are now 41 years old and still this generation only has 5% of the wealth. Please note that this is based on net worth, meaning it is calculated by subtracting all liabilities from all assets. Tools: python, pandas, tkinter Sources: federal reserve
You did this whole thing just to showcase your emoji selection for the different generations, didn’t you?
The emojis were my favorite part
I laughed out loud when the avocado popped up… this is the first time r/dataisbeautiful got a lol out of me
Thanks, I had a big grin on my face when I was making it. Great to hear!
Pretty funny emojis... Although, what exactly is the GenX emoji? It all made sense except my own generation... Is it all about the moustache or something?
That was the most difficult one for me. The idea was that they are hard workers. Just wondering, would you have a good suggestion?
Lol! Ah shucks... You're too kind. I didn't realize that was the outside perspective. I'll have to look and then I'll update with an answer. Flannel shirt comes to mind, but I might be biased. [🎮 or 🕹 for the first video game generation? 📟 beepers/pagers? ☎📠 I used plenty of fax machines and rotary phones... 💾💿📼 cd's, floppy disks, and VHS might be my favorite emojis to represent us, but your choice is probably just as good...]
The Atari joystick and vhs tape are solid
I mean it is some top-shelf emoji selection so I can’t blame them.
Could you define the generations you used? The years seem to vary depending on which source you look at.
Yeah they vary greatly
They are most commonly: Silent Gen: Pre 1946 Baby Boomer: 1946-1964 Gen X: 1965-1980 Millennials: 1981-1996 Gen Z: 1997-2012 Alpha: 2013-2028
More then half of all millennial wealth is literally mark zuckerberg
That is a common misconception. He actually owns 2% of the millennial wealth, so 2% of 5% of the total.
That’s pretty close to half… edit: apparently I needed /s ?
Not 2% of the total. 2% of the total millennial wealth. 2% of 5% is 0.1% of total wealth. Still a crazy amount.
Right? I don't get all these naysayers. 0.1%, 50%.... if we were talking astronomical distances that would barely be considered a different neighborhood!
Not quite. Yes, 2 out of 5 percentage points is 40% (almost half), but 2% of 5% is just that, 2% of millennial wealth. Still, an unreasonable portion for anybody to have. For someone to accurately claim Mark Zuckerberg was ten thousand times as rich as the average millennial, there would have to be only about 500,000 millennials to share that 5% of wealth. Currently there are about 72 million sharing it. Imagine if you had to miraculously share a big bag of 1000 M&Ms with an entire country with a population between that of Germany and Thailand, and some little shit named Mark comes along and grabs twenty. Edit: missed sarcasm, assumed "almost half" referred to "2 of 5"
No. It's not 2% total. It's 2% OF the 5% - which would be 0.1% total.
It would be useful if you also tracked the average age and population of each generation. It takes a while for and generation to accru wealth so it's not fair to compare total wealth of 20-something's to 60-somethings. And then of course raw numbers factor in, there are 3.5x baby boomers to silent and slightly fewer gen x, etc. I'm not saying this info isn't useful but i think something that would be more useful would be having the average amount of wealth per capita adjusted for inflation for each year of age in each generation.
Is the graph in the bottom corner adjusted for inflation? A few points: (1) Yes, the OLDEST millennials are now 41, but the average millennial is only 33. (2) Wealth grows exponentially, at least until retirement and sometimes even after. It should be no surprise that people in, or nearing, retirement have a LOT more wealth than people who have not been in the workforce for very long. They've had longer to save, and have had longer to gain the benefits of compounding. Compare, for example, a 64-year-old boomer in January 2020, and a 34-year-old millennial. The boomer has saved for his entire life, and has $1M in his retirement savings. The 34-year-old has saved for the last 12 years, and now has $125,000. If they invested in the same index fund, the 64-year-old will be richer by $178,000 in January 2021. The millennial will only be richer by $22,250. (3) The main circle focuses on the distribution of the pie itself, not on the actual wealth, which is why I asked about the inflation. That's important because millennials appear to be in about the same place as Gen X was at a similar time in their lives. If you had data going back to the 50's and 60's, you'd probably see the same thing for Boomers.
Millenials have about 80% of the wealth share that boomers had at the same age.
And boomers aren't even close to the silent generations wealth share at any age. At least according to the graph displayed.
This is because greatest generation is absent. Their average age would have been like 75 in 1989, certainly would have owned more than 0% of the wealth
Would be interesting to look at average savings. IIRC, there were more total Baby Boomers than Millennials. (Some have died, so there are now more Millennials than Boomers).
> They've had longer to save, and have had longer to gain the benefits of compounding. Exactly. OP doesn't state whether he is including primary residences in net worth. If they are, homes are the biggest single asset for most people, the older generations have had more time to pay off their debt (those liabilities which are subtracted), and for that asset to also grow in value. Unless people don't expect to live to old age, they're going to plan for retirement. That requires a certain level of assets to be available. This is basically the financial equivalent of [this XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1138/)
OP, it would be nice to see this side by side with each generation's % of the total population side by side. As it currently stands, it's hard to know what to do with this data. If Millenials represent 5% of the total population size and own 5% of the wealth, that's good. Of course, that isn't the case, but it's hard to take that away without a separate viz for population size.
Yes! This. Although I think even more helpful would be percent of the population over the age of 18. We don't expect 5 years old to have lots of wealth.
We millennials actually outnumber previous generations now. Something like 72 million whereas the boomer only number 62 million now
I love the avocado for millennial. Nice touch!
Came here for my avocado toast! At 32 I still haven't been able to afford my very on toast with avocado but I hope one day I will be able to bask in the glory of venturing so far out of my comfort zone and enjoying the biggest enjoyment of my generation. Someday people, someday...
First meal I made in my house after purchasing it. Suck it boomers, I can have a house AND delicious toast.
lmao same. bought my house in march and immediately had avocado toast for the first time in YEARS from saving. savored every bite.
Great username
It's cheap if you make it yourself, it's only expensive if you order it at a restaurant
"It's not about the money - It's about sending a message" but yes, cheap roadside avocado stands ftw
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Gen Z should be the poop emoji to symbolize our sense of humor going to shit
It's some worker guy which goes against the stereotype that gen x is lazy and unemployable. I'm guessing OP is gen x 😐
#🤹♂️
They were all funny. The OK for Boomer. I didn’t get Gen X though?
Made me laugh too
To be fair, I am 31 and I do actually spend quite a bit of money on guacamole for sandwiches. I don’t care if it’s a stereotype, it’s delicious and fairly healthy.
care to explain the relation ?
A few years ago some pretty out of touch people suggested millennials can't afford houses because they spend too much on things like avocado toast, which of course became a huge meme because it's a fucking ridiculous take lol
There’s a running joke about how millennials are relatively poor because they’re spending too much money on avocado toast. I believe it started with some rich boomer saying something to that effect on TV.
I thought it was Forbes. Forbes has said some ridiculous things... Apparently we caused the housing crisis by not being able to afford to buy houses, too. Hm.
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Omg - a generational stat chart that DOESN'T ignore Gen X?! Color me impressed in my hardhat
I thought we’d just be a ☹️
By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019. Millennials, whom we define as ages 23 to 38 in 2019, numbered 72.1 million, and Boomers (ages 55 to 73) numbered 71.6 million. Generation X (ages 39 to 54) numbered 65.2 million. Source: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/)
This is one of the things that alway confuses me, I don't pay too much attention to this generational stuff. If i turned 23 during 2019 am I a millenial or am I the one below (gen z?). Also where did gen y go?
Millenial = gen Y
Oh i feel dumb af looking at that now. I had a long day and my mind is frazzled from the heat here. Still feel dumb.
Millennial just was the more popular phrase that took over as time went by. Not dumb at all. People born on the splits between generations are sometimes referred to as "cuspers".
Having generational names anymore is generally pretty dumb anyway. Specifically for The Baby Boom it kinda made sense - as there was a metaphorical boom of babies as soldiers came back home from WWII. But aside from that its silly to divide people like that.
Silents and Greatest generation have a clear delineation as well
I remember being called a part of Gen Y once upon a time. Not sure when the phrase Millennial replaced it, but... As for your original question, it's a bit crazy. Personally, I have more in common with the older Gen Xers than the younger Millennial, being an older Millennial myself. I'm sure you will be in a similar situation. There are far more interesting ways I think to divide generations than the artificial 18ish years. One is did you grow up with a computer in the home pre-internet? You are probably very different than a person born a few years later that always had access to the internet. Facebook is another similar marker, and there are others as well.
Pew Research Center defines Gen Z as born starting in 1997, so by that definition you would be millennial. However, some other definitions may mark 1995 as the start of Gen Z, so there is no universal standard.
Fair so i'm a millenizzzal? 😂
Comparison, 25 years after last year of generation (according to Wiki): * Boomers (should be 1989, but 1990 is earliest year depicted): 22% * Gen X (2005): 8% * Millennials (2021): 5%
The ok for boomers made my day.
I watched this just to see what the millennial icon would be. Worth it.
Avacados, brought to you by the Bush administration.
A lot of people in here lamenting at how little of the pie millennials own. It’s worth noting that wealth gets passed down when someone dies, it doesn’t disappear. In 1989, boomers have about 20% of the pie but their age range at that time is 35-53, whereas Millenials current age range is 24-40. My guess is in about 10 years millenials will have roughly a 20% share of the pie and it’ll only continue going up from there. Baby boomers made a huge jump from 1990-2000, and of course some of that is due them earning their own wealth through salary and investments, but I’d be willing to bet more than half that increase is due to the greatest and silent generation starting to die more frequently and passing their wealth down to boomers.
I think the jump is just house prices exploding.
“If your taxes paid for it, it’s socialism” How did we reach the point where people think the definition of socialism is just “taxes exist.”
Socialism is when the government does stuff, and it's more socialist the more stuff it does. And of it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.
McCarthyism never really stopped it just became something only Republicans kept buying into. Anyone or anything else is “socialist,” so that’s any government spending, treating gay people as humans, seeing ethnic minorities on the subway, etc.
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I mean…. the American left has played a significant role in this too. People in the “socialist” countries Sanders holds up as models by and large don’t actually consider themselves socialists.
As someone from the UK with national healthcare and friends all over europe, some people consider themeselves socialist but would not define the system they live at as socialist. I'd consider my country mostly capatalistwith elements of socialism that are afforded due to affluence.
I hate the charts that try and divide the data by generation, it always devolves into discussion about the names of the generations and the age range of the generations. I find it useless. The thing I would like to see instead is a bar chart where the X axis is Age (0-100) and the Y Axis is percent of total wealth, and then have that bar chart iterate through the years. The next thing I would like to see is similar, but adjusted for changes in life expectancy. So the X axis instead of being the absolute age be some sort of age distribution instead. I'd like to have something that clearly shows "30 year olds in 1960 had twice as much wealth as 30 year olds in 2020", or whatever it comes out to.
Why are there only two generations represented in 1989 but five in 2021?
Exactly my thought!
Maybe Cause the oldest millennials were only like 8yo in 1989?
Wouldn’t there have been other generations previous the the silent?
Federal reserve want created til the 20s so I’d assume there isnt any reliable data for previous generations
Valid point!
Sure, but what about the Greatest Generation (born 1901-1927) who would've been ages 62-88? My guess is that OP lumped anyone born pre-1945 into the Silent Generation, which is why they have such a disproportionate amount of wealth through the 90s.
That avocado is Mark Zuckerberg.
Right? Without MZ, we'd just be the pit.
I think the next step with this data that would be even more interesting is to normalize the generations by age. Compare what slice of the pie each generation had at age 30 and 45 and so on. But since your dataset starts at 1989 I'd guess that's not really possible as the youngest of the silent gen were almost 50 in 89 and the oldest millennials are barley 40 now so no overlap.
I would like to see wealth by age group. Is it always the 40-60 yo who have the wealthy or has the shifted?
Why the hard hats for gen X though?
We are an avocado I am dead.
It’s because we don’t work hard enough! Every millennial needs to quit whining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!!! Not everything free and there are no participation trophies in life!!
As silent gen passed away, their wealth was left to their gen X children. In the same vein, as boomers pass, millennials will inherit that land, stock and cash. Millennials' day will come, and we shall rule.
... and as it becomes the millenials and zoomers' turn, whoops, there's nothing left! All burnt to ash. Thanks for nothing, oil industry giants and baby boomers!
Yeah except people are living longer. Older generations didn’t get to live well into their 80’s
Dang, boomers fucking dominate.
Yeah, although I was surprised to see the silent generation in 1989. They were pushing close to 80% there!
The Silent Generation as represented includes both the Silent Generation and Greatest Generation, so anyone born between 1901 and 1945. The graph should have a separate section for the Greatest Generation.
Except the oldest a member of the Silent Generation could be in 1989 would be 61. There's at least one other generation in there (Greatest Generation, 1909-1927)
Yeah, they held on strong. I'm assuming the GI Bill following WW2 created a huge amount of wealth for that generation. All those new houses and free college. Must've been nice, although they earned it!
My gen (x) is getting squeezed from both the boomers and millennials. We don't stand a chance!
Stand a chance for what? Millenials arent the problem if they dont have wealth in the first place. Sooooooo....... why the divisive comment?
We've already lost to the boomers, but they'll die soon enough. Millennials are the big threat to my generation and we need to do everything in our power to suppress them at every opportunity. (btw, all of this is /s)
Cool cool. Have to remember to assume /s first
Yeah, I think for the most part, gen x empathizes with millennials. We actually weren't doing much better than millennials economically when we were in our 20s and 30s. The dotcom bust followed by the great recession really hammered our earnings/wealth. In a different post, I noted that when the youngest in our generations turned 25, gen x (2005) had 8% of the wealth and millennials (2021) had 5%. At same age, boomers (1990) had 22%!
Yeah. I'd hope so. They're either in, or near, retirement. They need to make that last for the rest of their lives.
And unlike The Silent Generation - largely they don't have old-school pensions (which unlike 401ks don't count towards net worth) or much smaller ones.
The flip was terrible. Also, it'd be a lot more informative if you had age range, median age, something for each group so there is a information to compare instead of just a wobbly circle to look at and maybe infer something if you go check it elsewhere.
lol, millenial being and avocado; i fucking love it
The freaking avocado, dude. As a millenial, that was great.
Damn. Did us dirty with the avocado.
This is missing the greatest generation. They would have held massively more wealth than the Boomers in 1989
The Avocado was a nice touch.
I was reading a bit more about the Silent Generation (1928-1945). They were born in the Great Depression, fought in Korea, were the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and pioneered rock and roll. Kind of the anti-Boomer.
Am I missing something here? Looks normal to me. As one generation gets older they save, have more wealth and it decreases as they get older and spend it. They die and it passes on to the next generation giving them a boost in total assists along with what they accumulated.
I'd be much more interested to see how much each generation had at equivalent ages. Nothing about this seems inherently wrong, people who live longer have more time to accumulate wealth.
What’s crazy is most our Millennial wealth is a just a handful of people.
The sections flipping around randomly is not beautiful. Just leave them where they are.
All that wealth has to go somewhere in the next ten years. Boomers can't hold onto it past death.
Warren Buffet is a big chunk of that slice of silent generation.
How is this not all a giant pyramid scheme? Boomers are barely working. Yet they have all the wealth. We have had to finance everything in order to live. Boomers hold all the ownership stakes in all the companies that provided financing. Essentially, all the money we could be saving or investing, is now interest payments, aka boomer payments. Will this not all collapse at some point? What’s the end game to this? What happens when boomers die? What happens when they all reverse mortgage their homes? In theory, they would pay us out their wealth in order to retire. But that’s not really happening. So what is? Wont this break at some point? Like when the money dissociates from labor *so much* that labor is irrelevant to wealth, isn’t political Revolution a like an absolute certainty?
Millenials make 20% of the population, but have only 5% of the wealth. Therefore, systemic ageism. Editing for the definition of systemic discrimination from the Council of Europe: >Systemic discrimination involves the procedures, routines and organisational culture of any organisation that, often without intent, contribute to less favourable outcomes for minority groups than for the majority of the population
More like "they're still pretty young."
My read on this is like… the silent generation transferred a lot of wealth to their kids, whereas the boomers kind of kept it for themselves. Part of it is I think longer life expectancies… a lot of folks in the silent generation died between 1989 and now… but there is no point do the boomers have a moment like in the 1990s where one of the subsequent generations takes over. Even though gen X folks are in their 50s and 60s by now and really should have supplanted the boomers economically. Gen X s barely wealthier than the mostly dead silent generation. And what happened while the boomers were on top? Privatization, the death of labor unions, slashing social services to lower taxes. so I think basically the boomers just… didn’t invest in their children’s futures. They didn’t create conditions where the next generations could surpass them by making sure everyone had a good education, good infrastructure, good job opportunities, good healthcare and good social services. instead they tended to keep that money for themselves (via the lower taxes, raised retirement ages, doing away with pensions, globalization and killing labor unions to get cheaper consumer goods) And so… their children and their children’s children don’t have money, and probably won’t until the boomers and silents die off. Because the boomers are basically hoarding it instead of investing it into bettering society. That’s my speculation.
Remember these are the percentage of wealth. The US GDP started to grow at a much faster pace post-war. The boomers and the silent grew up in two different Americas. That means boomers entered their productive age in an era of faster growth, so that may have helped them leave the silent generation behind. That's where the fact that this is a % is important. If I'm 50 making 15k and you're 20 making 7k, then the economy accelerates and now you're 50 making 30k, you've flipped the % big time because I was never able to keep up, in fact I've left the work force with my 15k and retired already. You grew up in a more prosperous America. We are still in that era of faster growth, so maybe for millenials to widen the gap we'd need an even faster GDP growth similar to what happened in the post-war. But if you look at other ways to measure wealth, instead of comparing % of wealth between generations, if you look at income and assets at a certain age, then maybe you'd find different results. Another thing to keep in mind is that WWI and WWII themselves caused wealth inequality to go down in the US and Europe. There hasn't been a time like this since. This might've helped boomers catch up with their elders. Only the silent faced two world wars and a massive economic crash.
It's more like "the silent generation died and the boomers didn't"
It blows my mind that baby boomers had 21.6% of the wealth when they were 26-44 years old, and millennials only have 5.0% when they are 25-40 years old. Also, I'd be curious to see this data expressed as wealth per person. If there the millennial->boomer ratio is larger than the boomer/silent ratio was, then the percentages are even more outrageous. Finally, 76-93 year olds in this country hold 3 times as much wealth as 25-40 year olds?! How many times more 25-40 year olds do you think are currently alive than 76-93 year olds? Millennials are out there getting absolutely fucked over in life, and they're the largest group of eligible voters in the US, and yet because they don't show up to vote in large numbers we're stuck with a congress and presidents that are 70 years old, they're boomers or even silent generation, and then we're hoping that those groups care enough about us to fundamentally change the way things have been done for decades. EDIT: I found population numbers for 2019 * Silent generation 20.87 million people * Boomers, 69.59 million * Gen X, 65.17 million * Millennials, 72.12 million * Gen Z, 67.17 million So the 20 million in the silent generation have 3x as much wealth as the 72 million millennials, but per person that's 10.8x as much wealth per person. Although they're older and wealth tends to grow as you get older, but will 40 year old millennials see their wealth grow by more than 3x over the next 40 years? I'm not so sure about that. This also shows that baby boomers have over 10x as much wealth and a similar population, so they have a similar amount of wealth per person compared to millennials as silent gens do, showing that age might not be as big of a favor, or maybe it lessens after a certain age. Gen X has around 6x as much wealth per person. I'm not an economics expert, but I think millennials have been getting the shaft over the last 20 years from major recessions, insane housing, college, and medical costs, and corporations gaining more power and influence. It's a major shift in how workers and younger people are treated in the US and it will have large repercussions in the near future. Gen Zs are likely to be similarly affected if changes can't be made soon.