According to the central bank, those born between 1981 and 1996, better known as Millennials, control only 4.6% of the wealth in the country even though they make up the majority of the workforce, with around 72 million people.
While it is not unusual for younger people to accumulate
Yikes, when did we become the majority workforce demographic?
But seriously, 72 million working people don’t even account for 5% of wealth… What a broken fucking system.
Google says there are about 160M employed people in the US, so 72M is roughly 45% of the workforce. Vs 5% of the wealth. crazy.
I meant majority in terms of demographic. Like we now outnumber gen X and boomers individually. But yeah, it’s nuts. You also have to consider that it’s 4.6% total, so even the millennials that are very rich (multi millionaire++) are tallied in that figure. So average middle class and low income millennials probably account for like 2-3% of that wealth.
On the scale of wealth inequality we’re dealing with, a multimillionaire might as well be penniless.
There’s a few hundred people in this country that control more money than most countries. A couple of them have private fucking space agencies, and those are the ones that advertise their wealth.
Billionaires are a cancer on our economy.
I added ++ because I didn’t mean the millionaires with like $5-15 million net worth, but dozens or hundreds of millions. I agree with you, though. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, period.
The word you’re looking for is plurality fwiw. When you’re the biggest group but under 50% +1 you have a plurality.
You really need to factor in time spent working, these articles are usually worded to stoke generational war instead of class war. The main reason boomers and gen xers have more wealth is because they’ve spend more time working. It shouldn’t be shocking that someone who has worked for 30 years longer has a disproportionate amount of wealth. They’ve also had compound interest and compound dividends for 30 years longer too. The system is fucked but it’s not really old peoples fault. The only difference being inheritance - which if you think about it, the average life expectancy is 80 or so, people back then had kids around 25years old, so the average age for receiving inheritance would be around 55 years old. Making boomers a bit better off
I’m not naive enough to blame generations, although boomers and gen X definitely have their fair share of blame for other reasons. No, working class boomers and gen Xers both barely have any wealth, either. The top 1% in the US holds nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90%. That’s the truly disturbing and infuriating statistic.
It’s fashionable to boil everything down to class warfare but this struggle is generational in a way that seems important. It’s probably not even fair to look at this like a systemic problem. We have an older generation that is fighting with everything they have to prevent power and wealth flowing to their children’s cohort. That’s not just “capitalism”. That is a unique pathology. I struggle to see analogs in history of this sort of thing.
And people wonder why I have such an issue with so many 80 year olds being in power. This is why.
It’s like the country can’t even imagine a younger person being credible for the jobs anymore. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, America has an 80yr old man for you to vote for!
It’s amazing how many laws and initiatives where put in place to help Boomers and older generations succeed in life and how they slowly stripped everything away after they benefited from it.
Sort of an extension of the constantly growing period of adolescence. Boomers don’t think Gen X and Millennials will do it right, so they hold onto power.
This is my operating theory as well. That coupled with decades of media convincing them that “the kids” are lazy, unreliable, and taken with strange ideas leads them to believe that they cannot responsibly turn the nation over to us.
That’s bullshit, the majority of boomers aren’t happy to see their kids and grandkids struggling, they get manipulated into voting for these things by voting based on other things they’re preoccupied with, just like people of all generations are.
Broken? It’s operating as intended.
Gen X was at 6% in 1997.
The millennial equivalent to 1997 is about 5vor 6 years ago and there are more of them than us gen xers. They’re definitely worse off with a proportionally higher cost of living.
Are you really surprised that all the 20ish to early 40 year olds are the majority of the workforce?
Eh? It’s more of a sudden reminder that we’re getting older. Most of the time I’m thinking of millennials as the “youngsters,” which the boomers and older gen X coworkers kept saying when entering my career 14+ years ago. Time just kind of jumps around and suddenly you’re almost 40 and now you’re part of the “old” people demographic that the new generation of workers starting their careers refer to.
Also isn’t this skewed because Zuck accounts for 2% himself? I had read that in an earlier post mentioning the same.
2% of the 4.6% of the millineal wealth. A bit different than 2% of the total.
Oh yeah, sorry. I meant that. So in actuality its just the 2.6% amongst the rest.
No, he has 2% of millennial’s wealth, so 0.02 x 0.046 = 0.00092 or 0.092% of the grand total and millennials without him have 4.6% - 0.092% = 4.508% of the total wealth. If his wealth was how you interpret it he would be a trillionaire.
Oh dang, my bad.
Millennials are around 21% of the population. Looking at the chart, anyone younger (unexpected to work or control wealth yet) would be about 30% percent.
That puts millennials at the bottom of the workforce (youngest) so I wouldn’t expect them to control a huge chunk of wealth yet. Also boomers (at the top of wealth holders, and still 20% of population) aren’t all dead yet and have had the longest time to accumulate wealth. So I’d expect them to hold the largest share.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/
Many millennials are in their 40s at this point and Gen Z is past college years. Heck, Gen Alpha will be flipping burgers in less than a decade.
So when exactly is it time for the millennials (also Gen X–shout-out to the generation that always gets left out of conversations) to start accumulating net worth?
Because they are young. Would you expect an 18 year old to have 10 percent of the assets that say a 30 year old? Would you expect a 30 year old to have anywhere near the saved up assets as someone that is 70 and retiring after working 50 years?
It would be like saying it is unfair they have higher wages on average than the boomer generation. Being that later is half retired.