Your link is paywalled. But I’ve also heard this before and the main reason for this is that we’ve changed how inflation is measured, among other things. I don’t like replying with a half-hour video link but coldfusion’s “why is gen z so poor” Video gives a good overview, also using the article you linked as a source in the video.
Home ownership rates don’t need to take inflation into account. At the end of the day gen z, as individuals, own housing at roughly the same rate as gen x. The standard of living is higher and yes you can have this with inflation up and disposable income down people can still buy houses and do.
The US has weathered this global shift incredibly well, yet this sentiment displayed put Trump in office. It hurts me to see this disconnect and to see concepts like doom spending cheered.
Sure, but exclusively focusing on housing as an indicator for how rich a generation is gives a skewed perspective. Gen Z isn’t implicitly richer for owning a home, as they were able to use the low interest rates during covid which made mortgages less of a burden. They also have more opportunities to work from home, which allows them to buy cheaper houses in less desired areas.
However, just owning a home doesn’t mean you can actually get by.
It’s somewhat telling that despite all of those advantages, the average age at which people buy their first home is at a record high.
If we take this definition of the generations and table 12 from here, we can compare the values 16 years apart to see generations at equivalent ages. 2023 is the most recent data on that table, so millennials would be 27 to 42. We can’t match that perfectly with the 5 year bins on the table, so I’ll just average every bin that that generation covers a majority of. With that, we get:
2023
2007
1991
Gen Z
23.6%
x
x
Millennials
47.9%
24.8%
x
Gen X
72.0%
53.4%
15.3%
Boomers
78.5%
76.9%
49.1%
We can compare generations at the same age by looking along the topleft-bottomright diagonal. This shows gen Z having a lower ownership rate than Millennials did 16 years ago. Millennials were doing better than gen X 16 years before that, but have now fallen behind both gen X and the boomers.
Sure enough, the entirety of the discussion of homeownership in the article you linked is:
American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
Not sure what data they’re using since that doesn’t tally with the above, but that’s still second-worst, and the actual worst is the generation the post is actually talking about.
no way 47% of millennials own a home. i’m 34 and don’t even have a cent in the bank. I’m happy with renting though because home ownership has alot of responsibilities i don’t really want because im super lazy.
Using data from 1963 through 2022, we evaluate whether younger generations are seeing slower income growth relative to the generations that came before. We confirm that there has been a slowdown in intergenerational progress, except for Millennials who saw their incomes grow slightly faster than Generation X but still more slowly than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. Intergenerational progress has remained positive for all generations. Positive growth has been maintained for Generation X and Millennials in spite of their stalled growth in hours worked.
We investigate the role of two potential explanations for perceptions of worsening outcomes for Millennials despite their observed income growth relative to previous generations. First, we find that the higher household incomes of Millennials relative to Generation X, through their 20s, is a result of dependence on their parents rather than a rise in their own market incomes. By age 31, however, less than 10 percent of Millennials are still dependent on their parents and by then their own market incomes exceed that of previous generations. Second, we find that the rising cost of college offsets only a small portion of the income gains achieved by Millennials, especially when accounting for the growing generosity of financial aid.
Our results focus on aggregate comparisons across generations, as opposed to direct comparisons between individuals and their own parents. Each type of comparison provides important information about absolute improvements in economic wellbeing across generations. Future research should continue to consider alternative measures of wellbeing for evaluating intergenerational progress, including consumption, wealth and social wellbeing (e.g., Fisher and Johnson 2022). Results on changes in wellbeing over time, including the intergenerational
26
progress made in rising incomes, should inform discussions about how best to promote wellbeing in the future.
Gratitude - I learned something despite the misleading trailhead.
Millennials and on par with gen X. Also top third as a country.
Economist put together a nice article or you can dig through the omb data. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/generation-z-is-unprecedentedly-rich
Your link is paywalled. But I’ve also heard this before and the main reason for this is that we’ve changed how inflation is measured, among other things. I don’t like replying with a half-hour video link but coldfusion’s “why is gen z so poor” Video gives a good overview, also using the article you linked as a source in the video.
Home ownership rates don’t need to take inflation into account. At the end of the day gen z, as individuals, own housing at roughly the same rate as gen x. The standard of living is higher and yes you can have this with inflation up and disposable income down people can still buy houses and do.
The US has weathered this global shift incredibly well, yet this sentiment displayed put Trump in office. It hurts me to see this disconnect and to see concepts like doom spending cheered.
Sure, but exclusively focusing on housing as an indicator for how rich a generation is gives a skewed perspective. Gen Z isn’t implicitly richer for owning a home, as they were able to use the low interest rates during covid which made mortgages less of a burden. They also have more opportunities to work from home, which allows them to buy cheaper houses in less desired areas.
However, just owning a home doesn’t mean you can actually get by.
It’s somewhat telling that despite all of those advantages, the average age at which people buy their first home is at a record high.
Right, so the “where” is the USA.
If we take this definition of the generations and table 12 from here, we can compare the values 16 years apart to see generations at equivalent ages. 2023 is the most recent data on that table, so millennials would be 27 to 42. We can’t match that perfectly with the 5 year bins on the table, so I’ll just average every bin that that generation covers a majority of. With that, we get:
We can compare generations at the same age by looking along the topleft-bottomright diagonal. This shows gen Z having a lower ownership rate than Millennials did 16 years ago. Millennials were doing better than gen X 16 years before that, but have now fallen behind both gen X and the boomers.
Sure enough, the entirety of the discussion of homeownership in the article you linked is:
Not sure what data they’re using since that doesn’t tally with the above, but that’s still second-worst, and the actual worst is the generation the post is actually talking about.
no way 47% of millennials own a home. i’m 34 and don’t even have a cent in the bank. I’m happy with renting though because home ownership has alot of responsibilities i don’t really want because im super lazy.
The wording is highly biased and the article is poorly sourced. Here’s another link for the article referred to: https://archive.ph/wJJZv .
The Fed working papers ctrl-f “generation” -> : https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans.htm - the pdf paper includes the figures with non-biased language and here’s the conclusion:
Gratitude - I learned something despite the misleading trailhead.