It has become popular hereabouts (and elsewhere) to complain how tough Millenials and Gen X and Gen Z and all the others have it: Inflation! Housing! Student debt! Disco!
The Wall Street Journal has undertaken a couple of analytical articles comparing the multiple generations to the big bad boogey-man Boomers and what they find may be surprising to you, at least if you have accepted the conventional wisdom and complaints thrown about here and elsewhere.
For instance:
Did Millennials or Boomers Have It Harder? We Went Searching for the Answer
Millennials like to say their generation [got the short end of the economic stick]. Baby boomers like to push back, saying they didn’t have it so easy themselves.Well, who’s right?
The question is next to impossible to answer, but we can still try. Older millennials graduated into the 2007-09 recession, and most of the generation was in their 20s and 30s during the Covid-19 pandemic. Boomers weathered an oil crisis, high inflation and high interest rates as they got their start in the 1970s and ’80s.
To see how the finances of two of the biggest generations in American history stack up, we looked at some key data points from when they were similar ages.
After all is said and done (and it’s a pretty long article looking at multiple dimensions of wealth, we find:
Millenials have accumulated more wealth at this point in their lives than Boomers did in theirs. You can read the entire article here: https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-vs-boomers-charts-e6f1971b?st=hJXjYb&reflink=article_copyURL_share
So how about Gen X? OK, how about them?
Sorry, Gen X We looked at the data, and you had it rough too.
When [a recent Wall Street Journal article] compared the finances of baby boomers and millennials, the generation born between them wondered: What about us?“Thanks for remembering Gen X,” one commenter wrote.
In a reader poll asking which cohort had it harder, Gen X nearly beat out both of the generations the article was actually about.
So let’s see how Gen X stacks up. Now ages 45 to 61, members of the generation early on saw the dot-com bubble burst and then were hit by the 2007-09 recession as they approached middle age.
Short version;
Yes, Gen X has aquired more wealth at this point in their lives and careers than Baby Boomers did. Full story here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/sorry-gen-x-we-looked-at-the-data-and-you-had-it-rough-too/ar-AA218hRR
So, in my grumpiest of grumpy old man voice: “Quicherbellyachin”