Economist Writing Every Day

They’re following the same trajectory as previous generations: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-wealthiest-generation/

This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.

At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!

You've gone off on some other tangents.

Most people react poorly to the word hypocrite so ChatGPT found[1] some other choice phrases for people that are well off that complain about the better off.

> Why did they deserve the lions share of the profits over their employees?

You appear to live in the US. Ask yourself why those in the US deserve the lions share of world wealth? You seem to be complaining about others while not looking at yourself.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69141a5497948191a2d349e803d343c8

Disclosure: I'm well off for a New Zealander but I'm earning less than the median wage my cohort receives in NYC. Taxes total around 45% of my income.

Edit: 1/3 of US households earn over $150k. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/17/one-third-of-us-families-earn-over-150000/ - It isn't that uncommon in the US but that amount is rather uncommon in most of the rest of the world. I've just been to New Orleans so I saw one poorer part of the US recently so I have some point of comparison.

Short answer: In the U.S., 12 standard deviations.

In the U.S., deaths were 16%-17% higher than expected. The death rate was 17.8% higher than in 2019. Excess deaths were higher in 1918, but every other year since 1900 is lower.

Using 1946-2019 as our sample, the average yearly change in death rate is -0.2% with a standard deviation of about 1.47 (percentage points). The biggest increase in this year range was 3.1% (2.2σ).

If we go back before the antibiotic era, the biggest one-year increases are in 1918 (29.3%) and 1929 (7.2%). Note that statistics before 1933 don't include all states.

For some other ways of looking at the data, here's an economists blog post: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-mortality-in-2020/

(He was writing in January, so had less complete stats.)

Labor participation rates among women haven't changed drastically since the 80's. Also:

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/06/22/us-households-have-a-lot-more-income-than-1967-and-its-probably-not-just-because-of-the-rise-of-dual-income-households/

> In fact, this is also a period when the number of two-income households shrunk, from 35% in 1987 to 32% in 2020. During this time period, overall household income increased by 18.5% (inflation-adjusted with the CPI-U-RS). For households with just one earner, income increased by almost the exact same amount (19.1%). Income of two-earner households did increase even more (37.7%), so seeing the full distribution would be very useful.

There are far more Boomers than Millenials. Of course Boomers are going to have a larger "share" of U.S. wealth (compounded by the fact that Boomers are at the ends of their careers, in their highest-earning phase).

Here's an article [0] that looks at wealth per capita by age (and inflation adjusted), rather than by share. It shows that Gen X is doing much better than the Boomers (which matches my experience--my siblings and I far out-earn our parents), and that Millenials are on track to do the same but just aren't as far along the curve yet.

[0] https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-wealthiest-generation/

Is the average per capita really as useful as looking at the median per capita between generations? Also, millennials above the mean likely live in areas with higher housing prices.

Furthermore it is really hard to adjust for inflation over long period of times (especially when productivity has increased as much as it has in the last one hundred years).

EDIT: It looks like the same author of the above post also wrote about the median trend in the following post. However it looks like the original with the data this post is based on doesn't exist anymore...

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2020/09/30/ok-millennial/.