A new research report shows that the Baby Boomer generation is the wealthiest generation in the United States, with over $85 trillion in assets, which is almost twice the wealth of Generation X and four times the wealth of millennials.
According to The Washington Post, research conducted by Edward Wolf, an economics professor at New York University, shows that the historic wealth accumulated by the Baby Boomer generation will be hard for younger generations in America to replicate.
The economics professor pointed to stock market investment timing and investment in other assets as one of the contributing factors to the Baby Boomer generation’s historic wealth accumulation, according to The Washington Post. Wolf explained that the wealth of Baby Boomers increased from 1983 to 2022, while other generations’ wealth declined.
“It’s astonishing how their relative wealth has taken off in the last 30-plus years,” Wolf said. “They started out as among the poorest groups in terms of wealth back in 1983.”
In a statement obtained by The Washington Post, Olivia Mitchell, a business economics and public policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, noted that the Baby Boomer generation was able to enter the labor force during multiple decades of “strong economic growth, rising productivity, and relatively high real wages.”
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According to The Washington Post, the report indicated that housing costs, interest rates, healthcare costs, tuition costs, and childcare costs were also significantly lower for the Baby Boomer Generation compared to the costs for Millennials and Generation X.
“Particularly for middle-income workers, real wage gains since the 2000s have been modest, compared to the robust wage growth that Boomers benefited from mid-career,” Mitchell said.
The Washington Post reported that Jeremy Ney, a business professor at Columbia University, pointed out that Millennials had roughly twice as much debt as Baby Boomers by the age of 30.
Ney explained that there was a “tremendous boom” that the Baby Boomer generation was able to “ride for a very long period of time” in the aftermath of World War II.
“And when you compare that to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when you compare that to the 2008 housing crisis, when you compare that to the declines of covid, it made it much more difficult for people to invest, accumulate wealth,” Ney said. “In 1940 there was a 90 percent chance that you were going to earn more than your parents. To somebody born today, it is just a coin flip.”
