Economist Writing Every Day

We’ve been cited in top newspapers, such as The Financial Times, before, but this might be a first. Our blog has been cited in Demography, a top-ranked journal in the field of demographics and population studies.

The internet is fun sometimes, and that is why we are here (almost) every day. Jeremy’s work is mostly about wealth, and this paper is mostly about income:

Has Generational Progress Stalled? Income Growth Over Five Generations of Americans

I was able to download the PDF directly from the journal website linked above, so it must be open-access. Instead of trying to restate all of their finding here, I’ll just quote:

At ages 36–40, Millennials’ mean net worth was about $95,000 higher than that of Generation X. Their home equity was $30,000 higher and non­hous­ing wealth was about $65,000 higher. Thus, although homeownership among Millennials has declined, home values have increased enough among those who own homes to increase mean home equity, while their nonhousing wealth has grown as well. Our find­ings of gen­er­a­tional increases in wealth echo those pre­viously found by Horpedahl (2021, 2024).

Horpedahl, J. (2021, Sep­tem­ber 1). Who is the wealth­i­est gen­er­a­tion? Economist Writing Every Day. Retrieved from https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-wealthiest-generation/

Horpedahl, J. (2024, Jan­u­ary 24). Young peo­ple have a lot more wealth than we thought. Economist Writing Every Day. Retrieved from https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/01/24/young-people-have-a-lot-more-wealth-than-we-thought/

Perhaps people will forget why this finding was such a big deal in 2021. It was the opposite of what many were saying!