Millennials earn 20% less than Boomers did at same stage of life

[progree]

8. Also 56% less net worth (all numbers adjusted for inflation)

Last edited Sat Jan 14, 2017, 03:33 PM - Edit history (9)

selected excerpts...

With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.

Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.

The analysis of the Fed data shows the extent of the decline. It compared 25 to 34 year-olds in 2013, the most recent year available, to the same age group in 1989 after adjusting for inflation.

The median net worth of millennials is $10,090, 56 percent less than it was for boomers.

This decline has occurred even though younger Americans are increasingly college-educated. The proportion of 25 to 29 year-olds with a college degree has risen to 35.6 percent in 2015 from 23.2 percent in 1990, a report this month by the Brookings Institution noted.

More: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/millennials-falling-behind-boomer-parents-080144745.html

My own perspective is that of an early boomer. I had to go into military service (the Navy) to keep from being drafted into going to Vietnam, though I am not a military kind of guy. Then when I got out and looked for a real civilian job, in 1976- early 1977, the unemployment rate was 7.5%, and I had almost given up. Then we had inflation build from like 7% to 13% over the next few years (with super-high interest rates and housing prices climbing into the stratosphere), followed by a super-recession with the unemployment rate peaking at 10.8% -- even worse than the peak unemployment rate of the Great Recession (10.0%)

Official Unemployment rate https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000


So yeah, we had a quite a few very difficult years. That said, I think today's young have it worse, and I feel bad for them. For one thing, college tuition was much much less for us, and few of my cohorts had a big student loan burden. I think that's a big factor holding down today's young.

Also back then, people with high school or less education could often get a good paying job (especially if white), today that's virtually impossible.

Back then, there were actually career jobs with pensions. Now we have a lot of gigs and mostly self-pensioning via 401k's.

And those bad years were followed by OK years and then the Clinton boom when 22 million net new jobs in 8 years. But since 1999 we've had 2 severe crashes followed by recoveries that barely almost got us back to where we were before.

Millennials face higher Social Security and Medicare taxes (or fewer benefits) thanks to ever declining worker-to-retiree ratios (even if the Republicans don't fuck with it), and will have to deal with global warming in a serious way or perish. I hope to be dead from natural causes before it really gets bad.

And a world with more nuclear weapons states with the means to deliver them long distance. I only have to hope that nothing goes wrong during the next 20, maybe 30 years. Millennials have to hope nothing goes wrong during the next 50-70 years.