The large majority of people do not have a lower standard of living than their parents at the same age. My dad’s family could not even afford shoes for him and he lived in Europe.
I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you should not assume your experience generalizes.
I don’t feel like having the nth argument about whether we are better off today than in 1980. Agree to disagree, i feel that the facts are obvious, especially if you subset to the population whose parents were in the US in 1980.
i think if you gave people a legitimate choice to go back to 1980 (and take their friends let’s say), we would see the revealed preference. certainly if you did it for a year and then gave them the option to come back
> turbocharged by the number of people that are descendants of immigrants
It's divided by whether you own real estate or equities.
Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than native-born Americans' [1].
We're probably going to see a surge in that disparity, now, given the immigrant workforce that builds and renovates houses is in the process of being gutted. That increases the value of existing stock.
exactly my point - if you were to subset to people whose parents were native-born US and compare their wealth to that of their parents at same age, it would be absolutely higher. it looks closer than it is because of immigration and we aren’t comparing to the parents in their home country
What I find interesting is that children in of immigrants greatly outperform children of non-immigrants when compared by household income. That is to say, the have higher economic mobility intergenerational income growth.
nothing about that is surprising and is exactly what you would expect when people move to places with more efficient talent markets, especially from pseudo-feudal societies that still existed in lots of the developing world in the 20th century, and that's before you get into the selection effect.
my dad was basically expected to work the farms his entire life and school ended at the 3rd grade where he grew up, he moved to the US and became a chess master & went to one of the best colleges in the country. impossible where he was from and really shows how stupid and zero-sum-minded old world elites are compared to the US/anglo culture.
The studies I am familiar with focus on the lowest income quintiles, where inheritance wealth transfer is less of a consideration. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if wealth transfer favored immigrants as well when families are controlled and matched for comparison.
WSJ? Might as well have not included it. It's paywalled.
That being said, it seems to reference property owners. Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind these was to make the company attractive to buyers. Eventually, they did find one: Oracle. They've since gutted what was a major employer for my region.
Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay hasn't kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while economic output has risen, along with COL [0].
Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age adjusted, in generations. (Anecdote: am Millenial. Own a home. Most of my friends do, too. Yes, it's a bubble, but it's a big one.)
> Where'd all of the value go?...(that's a rhetorical question)
No, it's not. It went to the people who bought houses. Including between 2019 and 2024.
Which generation's mode reached home-buying age in that interval, an interval also generously sprinkled with massive stimulus, a stock-market boom and forced consumption-reduction through stay-at-home orders? (That is a rhetorical question.)
"Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age adjusted, in generations."
Age-adjusted?
So if you take out the fact that it took up more of the one resource that matters more than anything else to become property owners, then, yes, Millennials have more of it.
> Age-adjusted?...So if you take out the fact that it took up more of the one resource that matters more than anything else to become property owners
Ask before assuming.
Age adjusted means taking each generation when they were the same age, how wealthy were they? A Boomer today is wealthier than a Millenial because they've had more time to accumulate. But when a Boomer was Millenial-aged, she had on average less wealth than a Millenial today.
If you have more wealth, you can theoretically purchase more goods and services than if you had less.
The exception to this, of course, is if the goods and services cost more, and for things that you need to exist in American society (healthcare, education, transportation, housing, food), those things generally cost several times more for younger people than they did, "age-adjusted", when their parents were the same age, often with a difference that is more than that in wealth. That's why wages have been flat.
There's also the question of how that wealth is distributed among the generations and how it's stored. If the property-owning Millennial owns a few rental properties that their peers have to pay to live in, the "average" properties owned by the group can be the same (or even higher) but the number of people those properties are spread among is lower.
There's also the fact that lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock markets as people need to participate in those markets with their 401(k)s to be able to retire some day. You can't sleep in a stock certificate, but if you want to have any savings, it's easier to enter the equities market than it is to get into real estate from a startup cost perspective. People are having to compromise the "stability" of their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more abstract definitions of wealth.
> You're trying to argue against facts with philosophy.
It is a fact that wages have remained stagnant for four decades.
It's also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between rich and poor, and that's what's distorting the figures you're citing. That's the only way, mathematically, you see wages remain flat while seeing wealth rise.
Look deeper at your facts, instead of letting them be tainted by your philosophy.
> wages have remained stagnant for four decades…It's also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between rich and poor
First is sort of correct for a very specific slice of America, those just above the welfare cut off. (For whom real wages have been flat to negative, assuming we scale up housing preferences and add in costs that didn’t make sense before, e.g. internet and cell-phone bills.) The second—about rising inequality—is true throughout.
Neither advances your argument, however—one can better off while others are much better off, and most in a population can be better off while some are worse off. (Observe the median Millenial and the statistics stand. Millenials are rich, in part because we’re going to stick Gen Alpha with the bill.)
I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you should not assume your experience generalizes.