Younger Generations Have Higher Incomes Too (and it’s probably not explained by the rise of dual-income families)

Regular readers know that I’ve written numerous times about the wealth levels of younger generations, such as this post from last month. Judged by average (and usually median too) wealth, younger generations are doing as well and often better than past generations. This is not too surprising, if you generally think that subsequent generations are better off than their parents, but many people today seem to think that progress has stopped. The data suggest it hasn’t stopped!

Now there’s a great new paper by Kevin Corinth and Jeff Larrimore which looks at not wealth but income levels by generation. The look at income in a variety of different ways, including both market income and post-tax/transfer income. But the result is pretty consistent: each generation has higher incomes (inflation adjusted) than the previous generation. Here’s a typical chart from the paper:

Continue reading

Young People Have a Lot More Wealth Than We Thought

I’ve written numerous times about generational wealth on this blog. My biggest post was one comparing different generations using the Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts back in September 2021. I’ve posted several updates to that post as new the quarterly data was released, but this post contains a major update. I’ll explain in great detail below about the updates, but first let me present the latest version of the chart (through 2023q3):

Regular readers will notice a few differences compared with past charts. The big one is that young people have a lot more wealth than it appeared in past versions of this chart! You’ll also notice that I have relabeled this line “Millennials & Gen Z (18+)” and shifted that line over to the left a few years to account for the fact that this isn’t just the wealth of Millennials, and therefore the median age of this group is lower than in my past charts. The two dollar figures I highlighted are at the median age of 30 for these age cohorts (unfortunately we don’t have data for Boomers at that age).

Continue reading