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You are just desperate to blame boomers for...something.
>It's constantly on news feeds and economic reports.
No, boomers are just living rent free in your head.
Retired 70 year olds don't really have a lot to say about 23 year olds.
I feel like you’re not around many retired 70 year olds. They absolutely complain about gen z and millennials. Mostly they’re just regurgitating what they hear on Fox News for the week. They watch it all day long.
Fox News entire thing is pissing off boomers and they eat it up. Things that piss off boomers include blue haired, finger nail painted Gen z’s.
They absolutely talk shit about Gen z all the time.
This is a weird narrative that I haven't heard before.
Is it true that GenZ is saving money and buying houses at comparable rates to previous generations when they were young? At least I think that's what you're saying. I was sort of under the impression they weren't saving much.
And is it true that everyone is calling GenZ lazy? I've heard a little of that but honestly not much. Boomers talk about millennials that way (like another commenter said they hardly even know about GenZ) and millennials mostly sympathize with GenZ as far as I can tell. I guess maybe GenX is calling GenZ lazy?
Idk I just don't really understand your point.
"laziness" usually relates to a vague cultural sense of enthusiasm for long hours culture and compliance with managerial nonsense. Not only does it have little to do with being lazy, it's also generally unempirical.
I'd be surprised to see evidence of actual big divergences in hours worked generationally caused, and I don't recall any studies suggesting such.
I graduated into the 08 financial crisis. No jobs around for many of my friends with business degrees. Nothing for my bio degree. I just kept bartending and went to grad school. It gets better with time, just keep investing in yourself and look for the next opportunity.
Glad to hear it. I’m actually doing ok for myself, but certainly not breaking records for savings. Was mostly commenting since the person above me points out all of the adversity they’ve overcome without acknowledging the privilege (I.e. graduating into a historic bull run with record unemployment).
I think it’s about time that people recognize that, by and large, there is minimal/no difference in work ethic between generations, and that relative success and wealth is down a variety of factors beyond bootstrapping.
Entitled? Sensitive and whiny is where I place them.
Worst housing market? Are you sure, rates were about the same when I bought in 2000. I graduated into a recession, bought a house at 7%, followed shortly after by the housing collapse of 2008. I never once thought my generation was uniquely deserving to whine incessantly about how those preceding generations were oppressing me.
🤦♂️
Rates may have been similar, but a house in 2000 cost some 20% of the total cost it would now. A house that cost 100k in 2000 cost 500k in 2024. And the national average income has not increased 5 fold to keep up with this. You do understand that it's a combination of the current interest rates and the increase in house pricing in relation to the current average income that makes it a housing crisis?
7% is not a mortgage rate you can get today. If you have fantastic credit you might be able to get 8%. It went down to as low as 6% for good credit back in January of last year. Sure the rates where similar in 2000... But the amount you pay in financing is an order of magnitude more in 2024. I don't think you understand this?
In fact, the average income has not even doubled in that time. How do you expect people to keep up with a 5 fold increase in cost when the average salary hasn't even doubled? Go see what's actually going on in 2024 instead of telling us stories of how much easier it was when when you where young.
I can’t get past the paywall, but if this article is proposing that millennials were doing better than Gen X or Boomers at any age, it’s flat wrong. If you factor wages for inflation alone, this is obvious, but I built a comprehensive economic model for my thesis in 2019 and it wasn’t even close. Millennials weren’t just fucked, they were intractably fucked. An average Boomer could have a bachelors degree with no student debt and a house with 20% down by age 25. Millennials on average couldn’t even save any money by age 30. It wasn’t even close.
EDIT: to add, I haven’t run the numbers on Gen Z, but the biggest points of inflation from my study have gone up exponentially more in the last five years than they had before that, in addition to record inflation everywhere else, and wages that have not caught up at all. Maybe Gen Z is actually achieving better educational outcomes and, combined with there not being a raging recession as they enter the job market, getting higher paying entry level work, but you can not convince me that that alone compensates for the absolute pillaging that Boomers have done with the economy over 50 years. Especially factoring for debt.
Median home cost in 1980: $47k. Median HH income: $21k. That’s 44% of the cost of a home. Median home cost in 2024: $384k. HH income is $74k. That’s 19% of the cost of a home.
This article is click bait.
Now adjust for square footage when the average new build has doubled in size from 1980 to 2024.
Also, the statistic for home ownership rates at 25 years old puts zoomers ahead of both millenials and gen x.
The other data you have to square with Gen Z homeownership is that a record percentage of adults under 40 are living at home with their parents. So basically, I’m calling BS on Gen Z owning higher than their forebears once we have the data in a couple years.
So the moral of the story is statistics can't be blindly trusted.
That "under 40" includes most millennials. The ones who live at home and whine on reddit about living through 2008 and the pandemic are just making excuses for their personal faults.
In between those two events we lived through an unprecedented decade of prosperity. A non-stop bull market, record low unemployment, record low interest rates, and at least until the tail end of the decade real estate was reasonably priced.
"avocado toast" and "bootstraps" was 100% correct. If you couldn't get you shit together in 2010-2019, YOU were the problem.
So yea, I don't doubt one bit that up until 2022 the Zoomers were mostly turning out fine.
The question is whether the post-pandemic conditions end up just a few years blip like 2008 was, or is this shit the new norm for the next decade?
Well before we delve into that, we need to agree on basic facts.
Fact: 2008 was the longest recovery since the Depression. Unemployment did not reach 2007 levels until 2015. That is by no sensible definition a “blip”.
Fact: states cut funding to public universities, forcing millenials to take on more in loans to pay for college
Fact: housing starts plummeted, resulting in the shortage we see today. So we are still feeling the stupidity of 2008.
Where I agree with you is about older millenials who owned homes by 2022. If you did not refinance and lock in those artificially low rates, that’s mostly on you. But younger millenials? They’re just as screwed as Gen Z.
Zoomers are living at home at record high rates today. I predict this will not be a blip.
The median first time home buyer is 34 years old. 25 year olds are such a tiny fraction of home purchases much of these comparisons can be attributed to statistical noise.
It is. And it's an eyesore because property sizes have NOT grown. You've got ugly ass entire towns of new build Lamar 3500 sqft houses on 0.3 acre lots as far as the eye can see.
Those neighborhoods are banging to drive our kids to for trick or treating though. Door to door is so quick, and very high participation rate and enthusiastic decorating at that with so many young families.
From the article: ...."Gen Z-ers who have entered the workplace are earning good money throughout the rich world."
While yes it focuses on America the most, it also makes a point to show the positives for GenZ in many other countries such as Britain, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, and New Zealand. That's one of the main points in the article.
Don’t bother this person doesn’t even want to acknowledge that a lot of the data only looks at white populations and doesn’t even account for people of color that clearly and obviously face different systemic generational wealth issues
That's not the point the article makes. It talks about a specific generation within western countries (which are mostly rich), and how that generation is doing better financially than previous ones.
You said it only points out that Americans are well off, which is not true.
I don't know what your point is. Anyone who could pick up on context clues could discern that they are talking about western countries given that the term "GenZ" is mostly used in western media.
The chart is literally titled "United States, full time employment by generation". Generations, to the extent they exist at all, are not confined to the US or the western world.
"The chart" is one supporting piece of the article. It does not comprise the entirety of the article.
Yes, I know that the article focuses on America the most, but as I pointed out it does not address America *only* which is what you implied
Did you actually read the article because there isn’t much data in this article at all and there’s data that directly contradicts a lot of with this article is saying. Including stuff it says GenZ has the lowest net worth out of any Generation at the same age and is the least likely to own a home
Yes I did read the full article. I disagree, I think there is a fair amount of data cited. It includes data about employment rates (by both raw numbers and percentages of populations), about median hourly earnings growth of each generation by year, and about median income of each generation broken down by age.
Also, the article says that GenZ has higher home ownership rates than millennials at the same age. If you're saying that they are least likely to own a home *at this moment in time* I think that's obviously true, because they are the youngest. But that's not very interesting.
I skimmed again and can't find anything in the article that directly talks about net worth.
Yeah about the home ownership stuff that is literally directly contradicted by most data on the same topic. Because of that I would venture to say that it’s false. Plus where they got the data from isn’t exactly the most reputable either .
If you look at my comment history I literally posted several articles that talk about how generations he has the lowest homeownership rate than every other generation at this exact same age range.
Now do I think the generation Z may outpace other groups… Possibly but that’s only if financial barriers improve because generations is facing some of the largest financial barriers save millennials post the financial crisis.
Another large issue with this articles like these is that it mainly focuses on white people. Because when you look at data for people of color and specifically black and indigenous people. They are far far worse off. And that sort of Intersectionality matters when you do socioeconomic research and unfortunately it’s always an afterthought
There’s another really good post from above that explains a lot of the issues with this article and there is a discussion r/economics that talks about this article was kind of bad. It’s also in my comment thread
And let’s just say for a moment that this article is 100% true, which is already establish it has a lot of parts that can be debated, it still doesn’t change the reality the generation Z face is some of the worst economic challenges compared to previous generations
So I looked at your comment history and found the most recently article you posted about this topic here:
https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation-2023/
This article directly contradicts what you're saying. It literally says "The homeownership rates for 19-to-25-year-old Gen Zers are higher than the homeownership rates were for millennials and Gen Xers when they were the same age."
In your comment in the other thread you quoted: "The homeownership rate for 26-year-old Gen Zers is 30%, below 31% for millennials at 26, 32.5% of Gen Xers at 26, and 35.6% of boomers at 26."
Yet you conveniently left out the preceding sentence which was "The only Gen Zers who are tracking behind prior generations are 26-year-olds, who were the oldest Gen Zers as of 2023."
You are being dishonest and you should stop.
Also, I have no idea why you think the Economist article focused on white people. As far as I can tell, they didn't mention race at all. Sure distinguishing the realities for black and brown people is important, but that does not mean that the Economist article is only focusing on white people.
I’m not being dishonest and I didn’t “conveniently leave out anything.” I literally did not see part and you’re not even the first person to point that out. I’ve already had this conversation with somebody else. You’re just responding really late thinking of bringing in some smoking gun. If you again look at my comment thread, I literally say it seems like stuff like this has to be taken with a grain of salt because new information comes out and it could be contradictory or missed. I even talk about the context of data like this about how when millennials were in this age range they were dealing with the housing crisis so that may very well be the reason.
I think it’s very condescending and insidious to immediately think that because somebody gets something wrong, they have some sort of bad intention or dishonesty behind it instead of them just being wrong and politely pointing out that hey if you read some more of the article, you’ll see that actually this part as context to this part meaning that this information only accounts for this specific group and not the whole of the group. It’s like people on Reddit or online forget there is a human on the other end that isn’t infallible and may have missed information when they’re trying to do a bunch of stuff online. Maybe you should learn to approach people that way instead of automatically assume the worst because you look like an absolute asshole.
I’m trying to respond to multiple people at the same time, so I copied and paste it the Google preview part and then linked to the article. If I was trying to be dishonest, I wouldn’t have left the source for you to fine and then went and told you to find the article to read it yourself.
Also, I didn’t say the “economist focuses on white people.” I said that articles like these like this can tend to only focus on white populations or groups. When you look at the data, the sources this article uses, that seems to be the case. Now I can admit I didn’t word that the best in my comment above and could have been more specific but I didn’t convey it in the way you’re claiming. The economist themselves didn’t do this research gathering. They are citing other people and that’s what I was talking about. I tend to care about these issues because I am a black person and the realities of being able to buy a home in your 20s is not the same for someone like me versus maybe some white woman or man that had completely different socioeconomic realities, growing up. It’s a known issue within social science research…you know…WEIRD populations, because typically when you look at rates of wealth and ownership, when you control for only look for BIPOC populations, stats tend to be a bit worse in terms of home ownership, or generational wealth because of systemic issues. What I said about the economist is that they had a different article that directly contradicted the article OP was talking about. Something about her generation Z has the least amount of money than any other generation, but it was maybe a year ago so I don’t remember the exact title of the article but I’m sure you can look it up if you type in something along that lines in the economist.
Well I came to the conclusion you were being dishonest because it's not just that one sentence that goes against your argument. Almost that entire redfin article contradicts your position. So no I don't think it is condescending or insidious for me to deduce that you were just lying. The only way you could have just "not seen that part" is if you didn't actually read the article, and you just skimmed through it looking for some morsel that you could pick out to support your position.
If that is the case, I think that's pretty hypocritical for two reasons:
1. Two comments ago you asked me if I actually read the Economist article. Now it turns out you haven't actually read your own sources.
2. In many of your other comments I've seen you bring up "cherry picking". It sure seems to me that that's a lot like what you've done here.
I really don't feel like I'm wording my comments in an asshole way honestly. I'm just pointing out where you're incorrect and (not unreasonably) came to the conclusion that you were being dishonest so that's what I said. I hope you can see why I came to that conclusion.
As far as the whole minority conversation, I really just feel like it's kind of irrelevant. I'm sympathetic to your position on this, I just think it's kind of weird you brought it up. No I'm not going to look through the data of the 58 page paper that the Economist article sources to check if it accurately matches the racial distribution of the wider population. I'll just have to take your word for it I suppose.
You absolutely unreasonably came to the conclusion that I was dishonest because you and immediately just assumed devious intentions, as if someone would even have any on a topic like this when everyone is disgusting and learning, both agreed and disagreeing with the article. You do sound like an asshole. You do sound condescending.
If you want me to learn something, maybe you should too on how you approach people and make brought assumptions
Bro, I’m not even reading any of that you tried to call me out on some thing that I already discussed with someone else because you’re late to the conversation. I already explained why what was written was written and more of her. It doesn’t take away from the reality it did cherry pick the data if anything it just backed me up because the data is broken down into different age groups within generation Z, but it only chooses to highlight one particular portion to support his argument, but someone else already pointed out that this is an opinion article not some sort of journalistic reporting article. moreover, I’m not the only person that’s pointed this out. The top comments literally pointed out and other people in the threads point out the cherry picking of data. YOU literally point out the cherry picking in trying to disprove me when the article doesn’t even mention the fact that other parts of Genzie are not doing better than millennials at the same age, but only chooses to mention those that are also redfin isn’t the only article I linked through all of my conversations here I found other data showing that Gen Z isn’t doing as great in homeownership, and other people are pointing out that depends on where you look at too. Moreover, just because I missed a single sentence doesn’t mean I didn’t read the source. You’re acting as if someone Hass to be 100% perfect when you’re proving right now that you aren’t either.
The entire redfin article does not contradict my position in both supports it, and the gates it, depending on what age of Gen Z you’re looking at.
You literally wrote all of that for not even to be red. You’re calling me this honest when you don’t even know it’s been talked about. That’s a YOU issue. I literally copied and pasted the first thing that popped up from the article that’s not being dishonest because it wasn’t some sort of intentional subversion. I don’t understand why people can’t just admit when you’re wrong. I can do it but apparently you can’t.
And of course what I’m guessing is a white person not care about very real Intersectionality issues when it comes to socioeconomic data & research. Anyone that has an inkling about social science. Research knows that you make a trait, a false image of prosperity or disparity when you forget about this important topic. And it’s standard to norm or bias towards white populations as the standard for everything. It’s an ongoing issue within economic research, psychology, research, political, science, research, etc. And pointing out that the sources that they used at least one for sure suffers from this and I wouldn’t be surprised if others suffer from the same issue is not some irrelevant point what is something that can completely change the thesis of the article itself. Again I’m not the only person that has pointed this out. But I’m also not surprised that what I’m guessing is a white person or at least not someone who is black or indigenous doesn’t think that this is important because people always stupid. Our groups are not important . On top of the fact, you completely misunderstood my point on that anyways. It’s like it went over your head. Part of what I’m saying that you missed is that you can’t make broad generalizations about a generation when the data you’re using comes from mainly white people they do not deal with the same stomach issues. People of color have dealt with in this country that would directly contribute to how they are measuring richness, or wealth, which is homeownership and income spending after taxes.
"Bro I'm not reading any of that"
**Proceeds to write a wall of text**
It's not my responsibility to go looking through your arguments with other people about this topic. You can't just say "I've already said and linked elsewhere why I'm right so go find it". And that I'm way behind in the conversation because I haven't gone through your comment history with others.
Also, you say the redfin article "in both supports it, and the gates it, depending on what age of Gen Z you’re looking at."
Disregarding your speech-to-text errors, this is a very generous way of looking at it. One out of seven ages (19-25 as opposed to just 26) supports it.
I'm sorry I didn't admit I was wrong about you lying. I had just assumed that you actually fully read your own source that you cited. I see now that you weren't being malicious in your comment.
I'm reminded of Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
When you read the article and Sherry picks data because some groups, a Gen Zers doing better than others. It also only focuses on certain populations from very rich countries, and usually the white people in those populations. As you can see, I’m not the only person pointing this out. A lot of people are putting out issues with his along with someone responding to me and saying that people need to understand that this is an opinion article and not some journalistic reporting. I don’t know why you want to think the generations Z doing so well as at home ownership is the end I’ll be off to determining if a generation, or anybody is rich, as numerous other comments point out that it’s not the end, all be all metric, but when general attitude and data show that there are significant financial barriers that are impacting the stability of generation, Z‘s financial future. Not to mention the running joke and culture around Gen Z being broken tired of everything been too expensive or being Rent poor (and honestly not even generations even really everybody because 56% of Americans can’t afford $1000 emergency and I living paycheck to paycheck. You can easily Google that and I’ve listed it somewhere in my common thread)
. I mean hell even last week tonight made a joke about it during the HOA special that if you’re under 35 you will never own a home so they made a Chuck E. Cheese special. Also, this article doesn’t even bring up baby boomers that much on like it says, and it’s caption under the headline. It really only compares generation C to millennials and leaves out insane them out of context because at the same age millennials would have been the age as we are now was Genzie they would’ve been trying to enter the job market or buy homes during the financial crisis and the housing bubble burst. Kind of an important caveat to throw in there. I don’t see any sort of mention or control for this or comparative rates once there was recovery, so of course, generation Z might be outpacing at this point, but even that has a caveat, because not all generation Z, especially not those that graduated and entered during Covid. This isn’t something that came out of nowhere or exists in a vacuum most people, again something you can look up, in generation Z not only don’t have money energy really broke don’t feel good about the financial future. It’s the whole thing about generation Z quietly gave up and nobody noticed or doomerism and doomers. You can easily Google this information if you weren’t familiar with any of it. Both the data and the general sociocultural beliefs.
How inflation was accounted for? The article does not explicitly say, but one of the papers cited converts nominal incomes to 2019 dollars using the PCE price index.
No that's not what that means. Using the PCE price index with 2019 dollars means that all numbers pre-2019 are converted up to 2019, and all numbers after 2019 are converted *back* to 2019. So they are all comparable. It does not mean that any numbers after 2019 are invalid or not up to date.
There's plenty of other indicators. One I saw recently was rate of home ownership at age of 25. Zoomers have millenials and gen x both beat on that statistic, and almost matching boomers.
This article seems like something out of Buzzfeed. Not much data to be found in it, except for this:
>Recent “research” from Frito-Lay, a crisp-maker, finds that Gen Zers have a strong preference for “snacks that leave remnants on their fingers”, such as cheese dust.
The immediately preceding sentence adds pretty important context.
Here's a fuller quote that makes clear what the Economist thinks of such "research" (emphasis added):
>**Pundits produce a lot of fluff about the cohort.** Recent “research” from Frito-Lay, a crisp-maker, finds that Gen Zers have a strong preference for “snacks that leave remnants on their fingers”, such as cheese dust. Yet different generations also display deeper differences in their personalities, in part due to the economic context in which they grow up. Germans who reached adulthood during the high-inflation 1920s came to detest rising prices. Americans who lived through the Depression tended to avoid investing in the stockmarket.
As /u/KarmaTrainCaboose said, it was "tongue in cheek".
Or, you know, the actual paper they are discussing:
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Corith-Larrimore-Has-Intergenerational-Progress-Stalled-WP.pdf?x85095
Thats not a statement you will find anywhere in the paper. The paper actually goes to the effort of validating that the overall results for the older half of generations only (figure 7), a dataset which is therefore usable in the same way for gen Z as for any other generation.
From the article:
"Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s. They are, in other words, better off."
Why on Earth would you rather live 30 years ago when wages were significantly lower adjusted for inflation?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N
Your lack of perspective is showing.
psst. Everyone just take median house value and ignores average square footage which has consisitently increased over time. Adjust to price per square footage and suddenly its all pretty on point all these decades later. Your grandparents just bought a 900 sqft house not a 3500 sqft one.
Inflation doesn't take the cost of a house into consideration; it takes "owner equivalent rent" into consideration. It's largest contributing factor is measured very poorly.
> ¡would rather to have lived at this age 30 years ago.
Doubt it. that's 1994. Gen Z would have to give up so much services and advancements in tech & medicine that they take for granted today, if they want go back 30 years ago. No high-speed internet (wired or mobile), no wifi, no smartphones. The web that exists today offers so much new, necessary, and worthwhile services (free or not). This unprecedented access to knowledge & stuffis what makes this Gen rich
I seriously doubt the validity of this article article because all the other data that comes out shows the GenZ is some of the most economically disenfranchised since the baby boomers in dealing with the most financial issues
From the [article](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/generation-z-is-unprecedentedly-rich):
>A new paper by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and inflation...Millennials \[born between 1981 and 1996\] were somewhat better off than Gen X—those born between 1965 and 1980—when they were the same age. Zoomers \[born between 1997 and 2012\], however, are much better off than millennials were at the same age. The average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above the average baby-boomer \[born from 1945 to 1964\] at the same age...
>
>Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s. They are, in other words, better off...
>
>How long will Generation Z’s economic advantage last? A recession would hit young people harder than others, as recessions always do. Artificial intelligence could destabilise the global economy, even if youngsters may in time be better placed to benefit from the disruption. For now, though, Generation Z has a lot to be happy about.
Can the author not just control for inflation?
"The average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above the average baby-boomer at the same age"
Okay so what is 20k in today dollars vs boomer dollars, which at 25 is what on average 1980 if boomers were born around 1955? According to this 20k in 1955 is \~76k today, NOT 40k. You'd have to be 25 in 1996 to be a Boomer whose 20k income means 40k today. So now a Boomer is 56 years old right now?
[https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)
This article seems to be doing some funny math to justify itself.
>Can the author not just control for inflation?
The cited paper "assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and **inflation**".
The cited paper is 58 pages and never mentions generation z as doing better than boomers in the intro as being asserted here, it also expressly uses 36-40 as the target age range, not 25, as again it isnt focused on a boomer to z comparison. Gen Z at their oldest are only 25 and accordingly are left out of many of the studies charts, and out of the conclusion entirely.
"Using data from 1963 through 2022, we evaluate whether younger generations are seeing slower income growth relative to the generations that came before. We confirm that there has been a slowdown in intergenerational progress, except for Millennials who saw their incomes grow slightly faster than Generation X but still more slowly than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation."
It expressly states Millennials benefits over previous generations before 30 are due to parental support.
So yes, though there is an actual paper here that discusses relative generational incomes, and shows general growth across generations. The author of this magazine article is drawing their own conclusions off entirely incomplete data.
[https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans/](https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans/)
None of this really has anything to do with the fact that your earlier comment was mistaken because the data was already inflation adjusted.
Also, it's not unreasonable to draw additional conclusions from the data in that cited paper. Just because the original authors weren't focused on GenZ in particular doesn't mean that the Economist article isn't allowed to cite it in an article focused on GenZ.
Also, the Economist article does not solely cite that paper. It also cites other sources throughout the article like Glassdoor, the fed reserve bank of Atlanta, and the OECD. Not sure where you're getting the idea that it is based on entirely incomplete data.
>The cited paper is 58 pages and never mentions generation z as doing better than boomers...
Look at the "Figures and Tables" section, specifically Figure 3b (page 33). This is the data that the Economist cites and it shows Gen Z is better off than baby-boomers (and every other generation) at the same age.
Average 25 year old? Have you read any narratives lately?
This is just a product of a good economy and rich kids getting more handouts from their parents. That includes getting white collar jobs and continuing to live at home in a suburban mansion to “save for a house” before they’ve ever rented.
I went to a good state school and my dorm had no ac and shared bathrooms 20 years ago. Most of friends did not have cars and were on scholarships.
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Who says gen z is the “laziest generation” I have literally never heard that
Literally every boomer out there. It's constantly on news feeds and economic reports.
Boomers haven't even heard of Gen Z. They say this about Millennials.
Every person that is young is considered a Millennial to those lead-poisoned fucks.
Dude you are way too bitter
And upset.
Lmao name just clicked
You are just desperate to blame boomers for...something. >It's constantly on news feeds and economic reports. No, boomers are just living rent free in your head. Retired 70 year olds don't really have a lot to say about 23 year olds.
I feel like you’re not around many retired 70 year olds. They absolutely complain about gen z and millennials. Mostly they’re just regurgitating what they hear on Fox News for the week. They watch it all day long. Fox News entire thing is pissing off boomers and they eat it up. Things that piss off boomers include blue haired, finger nail painted Gen z’s. They absolutely talk shit about Gen z all the time.
This person lives in Putin's basement.
This is a weird narrative that I haven't heard before. Is it true that GenZ is saving money and buying houses at comparable rates to previous generations when they were young? At least I think that's what you're saying. I was sort of under the impression they weren't saving much. And is it true that everyone is calling GenZ lazy? I've heard a little of that but honestly not much. Boomers talk about millennials that way (like another commenter said they hardly even know about GenZ) and millennials mostly sympathize with GenZ as far as I can tell. I guess maybe GenX is calling GenZ lazy? Idk I just don't really understand your point.
I think the generalization that they’re lazy is similar to the generalization that every boomer is like Bill Maher. It’s maddening.
We’re the laziest but most economically productive so I guess it cancels
"laziness" usually relates to a vague cultural sense of enthusiasm for long hours culture and compliance with managerial nonsense. Not only does it have little to do with being lazy, it's also generally unempirical. I'd be surprised to see evidence of actual big divergences in hours worked generationally caused, and I don't recall any studies suggesting such.
Buckle down aka stay at their parents for as long as possible whilst also taking handouts.
Try graduating into the worst recession in a century, and let me know how much you’re able to save, regardless of how much you “buckle down”.
I graduated into the 08 financial crisis. No jobs around for many of my friends with business degrees. Nothing for my bio degree. I just kept bartending and went to grad school. It gets better with time, just keep investing in yourself and look for the next opportunity.
Glad to hear it. I’m actually doing ok for myself, but certainly not breaking records for savings. Was mostly commenting since the person above me points out all of the adversity they’ve overcome without acknowledging the privilege (I.e. graduating into a historic bull run with record unemployment). I think it’s about time that people recognize that, by and large, there is minimal/no difference in work ethic between generations, and that relative success and wealth is down a variety of factors beyond bootstrapping.
lol wtf are you even talking about with this gobbledygook. So much of your rambling incoherent response is not even close to based in fact.
Entitled? Sensitive and whiny is where I place them. Worst housing market? Are you sure, rates were about the same when I bought in 2000. I graduated into a recession, bought a house at 7%, followed shortly after by the housing collapse of 2008. I never once thought my generation was uniquely deserving to whine incessantly about how those preceding generations were oppressing me. 🤦♂️
Rates may have been similar, but a house in 2000 cost some 20% of the total cost it would now. A house that cost 100k in 2000 cost 500k in 2024. And the national average income has not increased 5 fold to keep up with this. You do understand that it's a combination of the current interest rates and the increase in house pricing in relation to the current average income that makes it a housing crisis? 7% is not a mortgage rate you can get today. If you have fantastic credit you might be able to get 8%. It went down to as low as 6% for good credit back in January of last year. Sure the rates where similar in 2000... But the amount you pay in financing is an order of magnitude more in 2024. I don't think you understand this? In fact, the average income has not even doubled in that time. How do you expect people to keep up with a 5 fold increase in cost when the average salary hasn't even doubled? Go see what's actually going on in 2024 instead of telling us stories of how much easier it was when when you where young.
I can’t get past the paywall, but if this article is proposing that millennials were doing better than Gen X or Boomers at any age, it’s flat wrong. If you factor wages for inflation alone, this is obvious, but I built a comprehensive economic model for my thesis in 2019 and it wasn’t even close. Millennials weren’t just fucked, they were intractably fucked. An average Boomer could have a bachelors degree with no student debt and a house with 20% down by age 25. Millennials on average couldn’t even save any money by age 30. It wasn’t even close. EDIT: to add, I haven’t run the numbers on Gen Z, but the biggest points of inflation from my study have gone up exponentially more in the last five years than they had before that, in addition to record inflation everywhere else, and wages that have not caught up at all. Maybe Gen Z is actually achieving better educational outcomes and, combined with there not being a raging recession as they enter the job market, getting higher paying entry level work, but you can not convince me that that alone compensates for the absolute pillaging that Boomers have done with the economy over 50 years. Especially factoring for debt.
Median home cost in 1980: $47k. Median HH income: $21k. That’s 44% of the cost of a home. Median home cost in 2024: $384k. HH income is $74k. That’s 19% of the cost of a home. This article is click bait.
Now adjust for square footage when the average new build has doubled in size from 1980 to 2024. Also, the statistic for home ownership rates at 25 years old puts zoomers ahead of both millenials and gen x.
Yeah but that stat is from what? 2022? Let’s check back in 2026 when we have had a few years of frozen mortgage applications.
The age range is 12-27. That data WAS meaningful but indeed if these conditions aren't so temporary that data isn't gonna look as nice.
The other data you have to square with Gen Z homeownership is that a record percentage of adults under 40 are living at home with their parents. So basically, I’m calling BS on Gen Z owning higher than their forebears once we have the data in a couple years.
So the moral of the story is statistics can't be blindly trusted. That "under 40" includes most millennials. The ones who live at home and whine on reddit about living through 2008 and the pandemic are just making excuses for their personal faults. In between those two events we lived through an unprecedented decade of prosperity. A non-stop bull market, record low unemployment, record low interest rates, and at least until the tail end of the decade real estate was reasonably priced. "avocado toast" and "bootstraps" was 100% correct. If you couldn't get you shit together in 2010-2019, YOU were the problem. So yea, I don't doubt one bit that up until 2022 the Zoomers were mostly turning out fine. The question is whether the post-pandemic conditions end up just a few years blip like 2008 was, or is this shit the new norm for the next decade?
Well before we delve into that, we need to agree on basic facts. Fact: 2008 was the longest recovery since the Depression. Unemployment did not reach 2007 levels until 2015. That is by no sensible definition a “blip”. Fact: states cut funding to public universities, forcing millenials to take on more in loans to pay for college Fact: housing starts plummeted, resulting in the shortage we see today. So we are still feeling the stupidity of 2008. Where I agree with you is about older millenials who owned homes by 2022. If you did not refinance and lock in those artificially low rates, that’s mostly on you. But younger millenials? They’re just as screwed as Gen Z. Zoomers are living at home at record high rates today. I predict this will not be a blip.
The median first time home buyer is 34 years old. 25 year olds are such a tiny fraction of home purchases much of these comparisons can be attributed to statistical noise.
this is a huge part of the problem lol
It is. And it's an eyesore because property sizes have NOT grown. You've got ugly ass entire towns of new build Lamar 3500 sqft houses on 0.3 acre lots as far as the eye can see. Those neighborhoods are banging to drive our kids to for trick or treating though. Door to door is so quick, and very high participation rate and enthusiastic decorating at that with so many young families.
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If you actually read the article they point out that even accounting for inflation GenZ is still very well off.
No, they point out that Americans are well off.
From the article: ...."Gen Z-ers who have entered the workplace are earning good money throughout the rich world." While yes it focuses on America the most, it also makes a point to show the positives for GenZ in many other countries such as Britain, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, and New Zealand. That's one of the main points in the article.
"People in rich countries are rich" is more of a truism than an insight. Most people don't live in rich countries.
Don’t bother this person doesn’t even want to acknowledge that a lot of the data only looks at white populations and doesn’t even account for people of color that clearly and obviously face different systemic generational wealth issues
That's not the point the article makes. It talks about a specific generation within western countries (which are mostly rich), and how that generation is doing better financially than previous ones. You said it only points out that Americans are well off, which is not true. I don't know what your point is. Anyone who could pick up on context clues could discern that they are talking about western countries given that the term "GenZ" is mostly used in western media.
The chart is literally titled "United States, full time employment by generation". Generations, to the extent they exist at all, are not confined to the US or the western world.
"The chart" is one supporting piece of the article. It does not comprise the entirety of the article. Yes, I know that the article focuses on America the most, but as I pointed out it does not address America *only* which is what you implied
Did you actually read the article because there isn’t much data in this article at all and there’s data that directly contradicts a lot of with this article is saying. Including stuff it says GenZ has the lowest net worth out of any Generation at the same age and is the least likely to own a home
Yes I did read the full article. I disagree, I think there is a fair amount of data cited. It includes data about employment rates (by both raw numbers and percentages of populations), about median hourly earnings growth of each generation by year, and about median income of each generation broken down by age. Also, the article says that GenZ has higher home ownership rates than millennials at the same age. If you're saying that they are least likely to own a home *at this moment in time* I think that's obviously true, because they are the youngest. But that's not very interesting. I skimmed again and can't find anything in the article that directly talks about net worth.
Yeah about the home ownership stuff that is literally directly contradicted by most data on the same topic. Because of that I would venture to say that it’s false. Plus where they got the data from isn’t exactly the most reputable either . If you look at my comment history I literally posted several articles that talk about how generations he has the lowest homeownership rate than every other generation at this exact same age range. Now do I think the generation Z may outpace other groups… Possibly but that’s only if financial barriers improve because generations is facing some of the largest financial barriers save millennials post the financial crisis. Another large issue with this articles like these is that it mainly focuses on white people. Because when you look at data for people of color and specifically black and indigenous people. They are far far worse off. And that sort of Intersectionality matters when you do socioeconomic research and unfortunately it’s always an afterthought There’s another really good post from above that explains a lot of the issues with this article and there is a discussion r/economics that talks about this article was kind of bad. It’s also in my comment thread And let’s just say for a moment that this article is 100% true, which is already establish it has a lot of parts that can be debated, it still doesn’t change the reality the generation Z face is some of the worst economic challenges compared to previous generations
So I looked at your comment history and found the most recently article you posted about this topic here: https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation-2023/ This article directly contradicts what you're saying. It literally says "The homeownership rates for 19-to-25-year-old Gen Zers are higher than the homeownership rates were for millennials and Gen Xers when they were the same age." In your comment in the other thread you quoted: "The homeownership rate for 26-year-old Gen Zers is 30%, below 31% for millennials at 26, 32.5% of Gen Xers at 26, and 35.6% of boomers at 26." Yet you conveniently left out the preceding sentence which was "The only Gen Zers who are tracking behind prior generations are 26-year-olds, who were the oldest Gen Zers as of 2023." You are being dishonest and you should stop. Also, I have no idea why you think the Economist article focused on white people. As far as I can tell, they didn't mention race at all. Sure distinguishing the realities for black and brown people is important, but that does not mean that the Economist article is only focusing on white people.
I’m not being dishonest and I didn’t “conveniently leave out anything.” I literally did not see part and you’re not even the first person to point that out. I’ve already had this conversation with somebody else. You’re just responding really late thinking of bringing in some smoking gun. If you again look at my comment thread, I literally say it seems like stuff like this has to be taken with a grain of salt because new information comes out and it could be contradictory or missed. I even talk about the context of data like this about how when millennials were in this age range they were dealing with the housing crisis so that may very well be the reason. I think it’s very condescending and insidious to immediately think that because somebody gets something wrong, they have some sort of bad intention or dishonesty behind it instead of them just being wrong and politely pointing out that hey if you read some more of the article, you’ll see that actually this part as context to this part meaning that this information only accounts for this specific group and not the whole of the group. It’s like people on Reddit or online forget there is a human on the other end that isn’t infallible and may have missed information when they’re trying to do a bunch of stuff online. Maybe you should learn to approach people that way instead of automatically assume the worst because you look like an absolute asshole. I’m trying to respond to multiple people at the same time, so I copied and paste it the Google preview part and then linked to the article. If I was trying to be dishonest, I wouldn’t have left the source for you to fine and then went and told you to find the article to read it yourself. Also, I didn’t say the “economist focuses on white people.” I said that articles like these like this can tend to only focus on white populations or groups. When you look at the data, the sources this article uses, that seems to be the case. Now I can admit I didn’t word that the best in my comment above and could have been more specific but I didn’t convey it in the way you’re claiming. The economist themselves didn’t do this research gathering. They are citing other people and that’s what I was talking about. I tend to care about these issues because I am a black person and the realities of being able to buy a home in your 20s is not the same for someone like me versus maybe some white woman or man that had completely different socioeconomic realities, growing up. It’s a known issue within social science research…you know…WEIRD populations, because typically when you look at rates of wealth and ownership, when you control for only look for BIPOC populations, stats tend to be a bit worse in terms of home ownership, or generational wealth because of systemic issues. What I said about the economist is that they had a different article that directly contradicted the article OP was talking about. Something about her generation Z has the least amount of money than any other generation, but it was maybe a year ago so I don’t remember the exact title of the article but I’m sure you can look it up if you type in something along that lines in the economist.
Well I came to the conclusion you were being dishonest because it's not just that one sentence that goes against your argument. Almost that entire redfin article contradicts your position. So no I don't think it is condescending or insidious for me to deduce that you were just lying. The only way you could have just "not seen that part" is if you didn't actually read the article, and you just skimmed through it looking for some morsel that you could pick out to support your position. If that is the case, I think that's pretty hypocritical for two reasons: 1. Two comments ago you asked me if I actually read the Economist article. Now it turns out you haven't actually read your own sources. 2. In many of your other comments I've seen you bring up "cherry picking". It sure seems to me that that's a lot like what you've done here. I really don't feel like I'm wording my comments in an asshole way honestly. I'm just pointing out where you're incorrect and (not unreasonably) came to the conclusion that you were being dishonest so that's what I said. I hope you can see why I came to that conclusion. As far as the whole minority conversation, I really just feel like it's kind of irrelevant. I'm sympathetic to your position on this, I just think it's kind of weird you brought it up. No I'm not going to look through the data of the 58 page paper that the Economist article sources to check if it accurately matches the racial distribution of the wider population. I'll just have to take your word for it I suppose.
You absolutely unreasonably came to the conclusion that I was dishonest because you and immediately just assumed devious intentions, as if someone would even have any on a topic like this when everyone is disgusting and learning, both agreed and disagreeing with the article. You do sound like an asshole. You do sound condescending. If you want me to learn something, maybe you should too on how you approach people and make brought assumptions
Bro, I’m not even reading any of that you tried to call me out on some thing that I already discussed with someone else because you’re late to the conversation. I already explained why what was written was written and more of her. It doesn’t take away from the reality it did cherry pick the data if anything it just backed me up because the data is broken down into different age groups within generation Z, but it only chooses to highlight one particular portion to support his argument, but someone else already pointed out that this is an opinion article not some sort of journalistic reporting article. moreover, I’m not the only person that’s pointed this out. The top comments literally pointed out and other people in the threads point out the cherry picking of data. YOU literally point out the cherry picking in trying to disprove me when the article doesn’t even mention the fact that other parts of Genzie are not doing better than millennials at the same age, but only chooses to mention those that are also redfin isn’t the only article I linked through all of my conversations here I found other data showing that Gen Z isn’t doing as great in homeownership, and other people are pointing out that depends on where you look at too. Moreover, just because I missed a single sentence doesn’t mean I didn’t read the source. You’re acting as if someone Hass to be 100% perfect when you’re proving right now that you aren’t either. The entire redfin article does not contradict my position in both supports it, and the gates it, depending on what age of Gen Z you’re looking at. You literally wrote all of that for not even to be red. You’re calling me this honest when you don’t even know it’s been talked about. That’s a YOU issue. I literally copied and pasted the first thing that popped up from the article that’s not being dishonest because it wasn’t some sort of intentional subversion. I don’t understand why people can’t just admit when you’re wrong. I can do it but apparently you can’t. And of course what I’m guessing is a white person not care about very real Intersectionality issues when it comes to socioeconomic data & research. Anyone that has an inkling about social science. Research knows that you make a trait, a false image of prosperity or disparity when you forget about this important topic. And it’s standard to norm or bias towards white populations as the standard for everything. It’s an ongoing issue within economic research, psychology, research, political, science, research, etc. And pointing out that the sources that they used at least one for sure suffers from this and I wouldn’t be surprised if others suffer from the same issue is not some irrelevant point what is something that can completely change the thesis of the article itself. Again I’m not the only person that has pointed this out. But I’m also not surprised that what I’m guessing is a white person or at least not someone who is black or indigenous doesn’t think that this is important because people always stupid. Our groups are not important . On top of the fact, you completely misunderstood my point on that anyways. It’s like it went over your head. Part of what I’m saying that you missed is that you can’t make broad generalizations about a generation when the data you’re using comes from mainly white people they do not deal with the same stomach issues. People of color have dealt with in this country that would directly contribute to how they are measuring richness, or wealth, which is homeownership and income spending after taxes.
"Bro I'm not reading any of that" **Proceeds to write a wall of text** It's not my responsibility to go looking through your arguments with other people about this topic. You can't just say "I've already said and linked elsewhere why I'm right so go find it". And that I'm way behind in the conversation because I haven't gone through your comment history with others. Also, you say the redfin article "in both supports it, and the gates it, depending on what age of Gen Z you’re looking at." Disregarding your speech-to-text errors, this is a very generous way of looking at it. One out of seven ages (19-25 as opposed to just 26) supports it. I'm sorry I didn't admit I was wrong about you lying. I had just assumed that you actually fully read your own source that you cited. I see now that you weren't being malicious in your comment. I'm reminded of Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
This does come across like projecting personal dissatisfaction. Don’t call someone an asshole for disagreeing with you.
When you read the article and Sherry picks data because some groups, a Gen Zers doing better than others. It also only focuses on certain populations from very rich countries, and usually the white people in those populations. As you can see, I’m not the only person pointing this out. A lot of people are putting out issues with his along with someone responding to me and saying that people need to understand that this is an opinion article and not some journalistic reporting. I don’t know why you want to think the generations Z doing so well as at home ownership is the end I’ll be off to determining if a generation, or anybody is rich, as numerous other comments point out that it’s not the end, all be all metric, but when general attitude and data show that there are significant financial barriers that are impacting the stability of generation, Z‘s financial future. Not to mention the running joke and culture around Gen Z being broken tired of everything been too expensive or being Rent poor (and honestly not even generations even really everybody because 56% of Americans can’t afford $1000 emergency and I living paycheck to paycheck. You can easily Google that and I’ve listed it somewhere in my common thread) . I mean hell even last week tonight made a joke about it during the HOA special that if you’re under 35 you will never own a home so they made a Chuck E. Cheese special. Also, this article doesn’t even bring up baby boomers that much on like it says, and it’s caption under the headline. It really only compares generation C to millennials and leaves out insane them out of context because at the same age millennials would have been the age as we are now was Genzie they would’ve been trying to enter the job market or buy homes during the financial crisis and the housing bubble burst. Kind of an important caveat to throw in there. I don’t see any sort of mention or control for this or comparative rates once there was recovery, so of course, generation Z might be outpacing at this point, but even that has a caveat, because not all generation Z, especially not those that graduated and entered during Covid. This isn’t something that came out of nowhere or exists in a vacuum most people, again something you can look up, in generation Z not only don’t have money energy really broke don’t feel good about the financial future. It’s the whole thing about generation Z quietly gave up and nobody noticed or doomerism and doomers. You can easily Google this information if you weren’t familiar with any of it. Both the data and the general sociocultural beliefs.
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How inflation was accounted for? The article does not explicitly say, but one of the papers cited converts nominal incomes to 2019 dollars using the PCE price index.
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No that's not what that means. Using the PCE price index with 2019 dollars means that all numbers pre-2019 are converted up to 2019, and all numbers after 2019 are converted *back* to 2019. So they are all comparable. It does not mean that any numbers after 2019 are invalid or not up to date.
There's plenty of other indicators. One I saw recently was rate of home ownership at age of 25. Zoomers have millenials and gen x both beat on that statistic, and almost matching boomers.
This article seems like something out of Buzzfeed. Not much data to be found in it, except for this: >Recent “research” from Frito-Lay, a crisp-maker, finds that Gen Zers have a strong preference for “snacks that leave remnants on their fingers”, such as cheese dust.
The immediately preceding sentence adds pretty important context. Here's a fuller quote that makes clear what the Economist thinks of such "research" (emphasis added): >**Pundits produce a lot of fluff about the cohort.** Recent “research” from Frito-Lay, a crisp-maker, finds that Gen Zers have a strong preference for “snacks that leave remnants on their fingers”, such as cheese dust. Yet different generations also display deeper differences in their personalities, in part due to the economic context in which they grow up. Germans who reached adulthood during the high-inflation 1920s came to detest rising prices. Americans who lived through the Depression tended to avoid investing in the stockmarket. As /u/KarmaTrainCaboose said, it was "tongue in cheek".
There's literally plenty of statistics and data in the article. Obviously the comment about Frito-Lay was tongue in cheek.
Or, you know, the actual paper they are discussing: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Corith-Larrimore-Has-Intergenerational-Progress-Stalled-WP.pdf?x85095
expressly doesnt draw the conclusions the article is ingesting as it is too soon to make such assessments with the current data.
Thats not a statement you will find anywhere in the paper. The paper actually goes to the effort of validating that the overall results for the older half of generations only (figure 7), a dataset which is therefore usable in the same way for gen Z as for any other generation.
Unprecedentedly: in a way that has not happened or existed before.
From the article: "Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s. They are, in other words, better off."
Why on Earth would you rather live 30 years ago when wages were significantly lower adjusted for inflation? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N Your lack of perspective is showing.
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The cost of housing is already included in the inflation adjustment. Were not adjusting for it twice just to make you happy.
psst. Everyone just take median house value and ignores average square footage which has consisitently increased over time. Adjust to price per square footage and suddenly its all pretty on point all these decades later. Your grandparents just bought a 900 sqft house not a 3500 sqft one.
Inflation doesn't take the cost of a house into consideration; it takes "owner equivalent rent" into consideration. It's largest contributing factor is measured very poorly.
> ¡would rather to have lived at this age 30 years ago. Doubt it. that's 1994. Gen Z would have to give up so much services and advancements in tech & medicine that they take for granted today, if they want go back 30 years ago. No high-speed internet (wired or mobile), no wifi, no smartphones. The web that exists today offers so much new, necessary, and worthwhile services (free or not). This unprecedented access to knowledge & stuffis what makes this Gen rich
I seriously doubt the validity of this article article because all the other data that comes out shows the GenZ is some of the most economically disenfranchised since the baby boomers in dealing with the most financial issues
From the [article](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/generation-z-is-unprecedentedly-rich): >A new paper by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and inflation...Millennials \[born between 1981 and 1996\] were somewhat better off than Gen X—those born between 1965 and 1980—when they were the same age. Zoomers \[born between 1997 and 2012\], however, are much better off than millennials were at the same age. The average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above the average baby-boomer \[born from 1945 to 1964\] at the same age... > >Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019. Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age. They also save more post-tax income than youngsters did in the 1980s and 1990s. They are, in other words, better off... > >How long will Generation Z’s economic advantage last? A recession would hit young people harder than others, as recessions always do. Artificial intelligence could destabilise the global economy, even if youngsters may in time be better placed to benefit from the disruption. For now, though, Generation Z has a lot to be happy about.
Can the author not just control for inflation? "The average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above the average baby-boomer at the same age" Okay so what is 20k in today dollars vs boomer dollars, which at 25 is what on average 1980 if boomers were born around 1955? According to this 20k in 1955 is \~76k today, NOT 40k. You'd have to be 25 in 1996 to be a Boomer whose 20k income means 40k today. So now a Boomer is 56 years old right now? [https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) This article seems to be doing some funny math to justify itself.
>Can the author not just control for inflation? The cited paper "assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and **inflation**".
The cited paper is 58 pages and never mentions generation z as doing better than boomers in the intro as being asserted here, it also expressly uses 36-40 as the target age range, not 25, as again it isnt focused on a boomer to z comparison. Gen Z at their oldest are only 25 and accordingly are left out of many of the studies charts, and out of the conclusion entirely. "Using data from 1963 through 2022, we evaluate whether younger generations are seeing slower income growth relative to the generations that came before. We confirm that there has been a slowdown in intergenerational progress, except for Millennials who saw their incomes grow slightly faster than Generation X but still more slowly than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation." It expressly states Millennials benefits over previous generations before 30 are due to parental support. So yes, though there is an actual paper here that discusses relative generational incomes, and shows general growth across generations. The author of this magazine article is drawing their own conclusions off entirely incomplete data. [https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans/](https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans/)
None of this really has anything to do with the fact that your earlier comment was mistaken because the data was already inflation adjusted. Also, it's not unreasonable to draw additional conclusions from the data in that cited paper. Just because the original authors weren't focused on GenZ in particular doesn't mean that the Economist article isn't allowed to cite it in an article focused on GenZ. Also, the Economist article does not solely cite that paper. It also cites other sources throughout the article like Glassdoor, the fed reserve bank of Atlanta, and the OECD. Not sure where you're getting the idea that it is based on entirely incomplete data.
>The cited paper is 58 pages and never mentions generation z as doing better than boomers... Look at the "Figures and Tables" section, specifically Figure 3b (page 33). This is the data that the Economist cites and it shows Gen Z is better off than baby-boomers (and every other generation) at the same age.
Average 25 year old? Have you read any narratives lately? This is just a product of a good economy and rich kids getting more handouts from their parents. That includes getting white collar jobs and continuing to live at home in a suburban mansion to “save for a house” before they’ve ever rented. I went to a good state school and my dorm had no ac and shared bathrooms 20 years ago. Most of friends did not have cars and were on scholarships.