Millennials Earn 20 Percent Less Than Boomers Did At Same Stage of Life (usatoday.com)

According to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, even though they are better educated. Their median household income is $40,581, and their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher. USA Today reports: The analysis of the Fed data (PDF) 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. Education does help boost incomes. But the median college-educated millennial with student debt is only earning slightly more than a baby boomer without a degree did in 1989. The home ownership rate for this age group dipped to 43 percent from 46 percent in 1989, although the rate has improved for millennials with a college degree relative to boomers. The median net worth of millennials is $10,090, 56 percent less than it was for boomers. Whites still earn dramatically more than Blacks and Latinos, reflecting the legacy of discrimination for jobs, education and housing. Yet compared to white baby boomers, some white millennials appear stuck in a pattern of downward mobility. This group has seen their median income tumble more than 21 percent to $47,688. Median income for black millennials has fallen just 1.4 percent to $27,892. Latino millennials earn nearly 29 percent more than their boomer predecessors to $30,436. The analysis fits into a broader pattern of diminished opportunity. Research last year by economists led by Stanford University's Raj Chetty found that people born in 1950 had a 79 percent chance of making more money than their parents. That figure steadily slipped over the past several decades, such that those born in 1980 had just a 50 percent chance of out-earning their parents. 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.

Comments

Re:Can you say "the american way" ?

[geoskd]

If you work hard, you will do better than your parents.

Both of my parents earned 6 figures in 1975. I have an equal level of education as they do, and am capable of doing the jobs that they were (and in one case still is) doing. I am in the same industry as them. I had an opportunity to go work for the company my father works for, but the starting salary would have been lower than my father was paid when he started there in '72. I have spent the last decade working 70+ hour weeks for a fortune 500 company and in the end, all I really got was fucked for the trouble (Fuckers eliminated my pension). I have quit and moved on, but I have yet to earn as much today as either of my parents were earning 40 years ago, in spite of working nearly the same number of hours as the two of them combined. Hard work is not rewarded in this country anymore, and hasn't been since before I entered the work force.

Re:way too generous

[BarbaraHudson]

It's only wealth retention when it can be converted to other assets. We're heading for another housing bubble bust as boomers try to sell their homes to the next generation who just doesn't have the money to purchase that particular asset, even at zero interest 30 year mortgages. Those assets will start depreciating damn fast over the next 15-20 years.

Re:Can you say "the american way" ?

[gweihir]

The modern work environment cannot reward hard work, because the type of work you can work hard at and increase productivity by that does not have a lot of worth anymore. The type of work that is actually valuable stops increasing in productivity around 30-40 hours a week, and productivity per week _drops_ after that. This has, incidentally, been known since the time of Henry Ford, since he and others at that time did research into how to get the most productivity out of their workers in order to maximize profits. Turns out that this peak is pretty much at 8h/day for 5 days of the week for manual labor and 6h/day for 5 days a week for mental work. For some types of mental work that requires a lot of insight, it is even lower. Now the really astonishing thing (at that time) is that if you work more, you produce less value _overall_. And the other astonishing thing is that the modern corporate world thinks these results are somehow not valid anymore, despite human nature not having changed much (if at all). This utter stupidity sucks the productivity right out of people.

Hence it is absolutely no surprise that you are getting nowhere at 70h per week. You have terrible efficiency and your time is not worth much per hour.

Re:But the median college-educated....

[Orgasmatron]

In the late 90s, my high school started a vocational program. We had always had welding, auto shop and wood shop, but those were one or two class introductions. The new course built houses. Starting from a vacant lot and a set of blueprints, the students cleared the vegetation, dug and poured the foundation, framed the house, insulated it, roofed it, sided it, installed the electrical and plumbing, installed flooring and sheet rock, painted the interior, landscaped the lot, installed appliances and sold it.

I still remember that a lot of adults were upset that the school would even consider that some kids might not want or need to go to college. 10 years later, most of the kids that were in the first two years of that program owned their own businesses - roofers, painters, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, etc. Around the same time, people were starting to really wake up to the worthless degree + debt problem that the cult of college had caused.

Despite all this, people tried to get the program shut down every year for a while. The only thing saving it in the early years was that it was profitable for the school. I don't pay any attention to news from back home any more, but I wonder sometimes if the cultists were ever successful in getting rid of it.