Once you learn that this is not the baby boomers fault, but caused by the top 5%, you know what to do to fix it.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Who also happen to be boomers
But still agreed
I would say "national wealth" is not a valid metric unless you say which nation.
Of course the guy's name appears to genuinely be "Chad" and this seems to be a tweet, so one can guess.
Of course the guy’s name appears to genuinely be “Chad” and this seems to be a tweet, so one can guess.
He must be from Chad
Good guess.
Silly Earth dweller, everyone knows that ‘Murica is the only country in the world.
It's the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.
Sorry, I'm really bringing down the average for Gen X.
The American healthcare system and tariffs will siphon most of that boomer wealth to the shareholder class
What am I looking at here? Does anyone have a source for this graph?
Great question! I had the same one and found the source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariousness-modern-young-adulthood-one-chart/
This graph is strange to say the least. Are there reasons why it doesn't add up to 100%?
Not all Americans are in those three generations, certainly not in 1990 when it started. In 2019 maybe 3% of the population was older than boomers, and maybe 15% were younger than millennials.
Here's the article it comes from.
One big issue is that the generations aren't the same size. The article explains:
So we can say that in 1990, boomers owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth and represented 31 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.68 — each percentage point of the total U.S. population represented by boomers, in other words, owned 0.68 percent of the wealth.
In 2008, on the other hand, Gen Xers owned 9 percent of the wealth and made up 22 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.41.
That’s a smaller generational deficit than the raw numbers suggest, but it’s still a significant one. It illustrates the size of the financial hole today’s young adults are in relative to their parents. It’s a hole they’ll never truly be able to dig out of, given the way that money draws other money to itself via the gravitational pull of compound interest: The less money you start out with, the less you’ll make during the rest of your life.
In addition to the problem of different generations having different percentages of a shifting population denominator, the graph also has to deal with a shifting wealth denominator. Americans cumulatively were much wealthier in 2019 than 1990.
Plus, the interesting thing is that since this chart ends in 2019, the stock market and housing prices have boomed. Millennial wealth tripled between 2019 and 2024:
In the first quarter of 2024, the collective wealth of millennials and older Gen Z stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.
As it stands, the richest millennials are some of the richest young people the world has ever seen. Zuckerberg is on the older end of the millennial range. Taylor Swift is right in the middle. Not everyone has seen that kind of wealth, but for each billionaire there are thousands of millionaires who became immensely wealthy in some other way.
It's not a super robust methodology. I'd definitely correct for population size, and maybe just show raw wealth numbers by age to get a sense of whether one generation is or isn't on track. Boomers' percentages were elevated by just how poor the silent generation and greatest generation were, after the Great Depression and World War 2 in their prime earning years.
Silent generation wealth hoarding? The graph is definitely a bit suspect
Once the inheritances really start rolling in, you'll suddenly find the next generation much higher. What this graph misses is how much wealth is concentrated in such a tiny portion of the generation.
No. Money isn't energy. It can be created and destroyed. It is expended to survive. It doesn't remain static. Thus the amount 'lost' in the transfer will ve significant. Wealth from those dwindling inheritances will not come close to correcting this. The issue is is systematic. Tax the rich. Or observe the violent loop of history.
"Oh it's different this time bec.." K.
Also, I agree with you about the wealth concentration representation being lacking. This graph seems to have the goal of causing generations to yell at one another so they don't notice the rich are robbing them. Stated another way, in a room of ten starving people one person eats five sandwiches, the average person in the room had half of a sandwich.
Averages are used to lie to us all.
No. Money isn’t energy. It can be created and destroyed. It is expended to survive. It doesn’t remain static. Thus the amount ‘lost’ in the transfer will ve significant.
Yeah, the money will be "lost" to the small portion of the wealthy in the next generation, just like how a small minority of boomers are actually very wealthy.
Oops sorry, I just reverse-mortgaged my house! You get nothing, sweaty!
Yep, that money will be passed along to the small group of wealthy people in the younger generation who now run or will run the banks.
Health care costs
Yep, that money will go to the small group in the younger generation who will own the insurance companies.
I mean, all the graph really shows is that the longer you live, the better your chances of amassing assets of some kind.
It implies that baby boomers had some factors amplifying their chances, and it implies that later generations may have disadvantages as well as lacking those advantages, but that's still not a generational issue based on the chart itself.
If anything, it's a condemnation of capitalism, not generational disparities
It shows that every generation has less wealth at the same age than the generation before it, and that boomers are holding on to their lead despite declining numbers in higher age.
It's definitely a generational issue, regardless of causality.
It implies that baby boomers had some factors amplifying their chances, and it implies that later generations may have disadvantages as well as lacking those advantages, but that’s still not a generational issue based on the chart itself.
If the Baby Boomers had factors amplifying their chances, as a generation, and later generations did not, how is that not a generational issue?
If anything, it’s a condemnation of capitalism, not generational disparities
Why not both
Why not both is because it would have to be about the people to be a generational issue.
It's a systemic issue, and economic issue that's certainly influenced by people, but if you gave the current generation the same economic advantages the boomers had, their scale would would be either the same or similar at the same ages.
It's a semantic thing, I guess.
Generations aren't the same as eras, though. Generations exist within eras, but eras don't travel with the generation in this context.
It’s a systemic issue, and economic issue that’s certainly influenced by people, but if you gave the current generation the same economic advantages the boomers had, their scale would would be either the same or similar at the same ages.
... that's what a generational issue means.
Generations aren’t the same as eras, though. Generations exist within eras, but eras don’t travel with the generation in this context.
Clearly they do. The era is over, but the advantages persist in the generation.
They were in control of the era and ended it once they figured out some of the benefits they took for granted might end up going to their children
Then choose whatever terms you prefer, I ain't het up over that.
The point is that the same people or the generation that's at the bottom now would have equally profited from the previous circumstances, and the decline would have led to the same place for their children and grandchildren because the pressures involved were systemic, not a product of the individuals choices without that system.
I'm saying that people are people, and trying to pin the cause of a trend onto the people of a generation without the context of the systemic effects also being in the chart is misleading.
Spoken like a Boomer who got theirs.
Lmao! Yeah, total boomer here.
Totally not stuck on disability after twenty years in a thankless job.
I got mine, I can only hope you get similar in your own time
Yeah not likely unless we forcefully redistribute the wealth of the rich.
Well, yeah, that's part of the point