What that graph shows is what families were worth over a 14 year periods for a bunch of cohorts. And the data makes... a pretty smooth graph. There's lots of overlap and no obvious discontinuities, and no reason at all to think that there's any change in trend over time.

The only apparent effect that even possibly shows that younger people are worse off comes in the last two data points of each young person's line. But that's a totally obvious artifact, because that's the 2008 recession, which was the worst event of the 1989-2013 period graphed. (The 2000 dot-com bust was not nearly as huge.) EVERYONE'S line goes down at that time, including the oldest cohorts.

If the graph had more data, and showed what the 1901 cohort were like at age 31 (in the throes of the Great Depression), it would almost certainly be obvious that those 2008-driven dips aren't especially bad, comparatively. And yet, that's the old-person generation that is supposed to be the envy of the young.

This is just terrible interpretation of some unsurprising data.

[1] https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

They're both terrible at saving, their combined income was never over 50% of what I'm currently making, yet they have both been retired and comfortably living off these "investments" for 20+ years now.

I, on the other hand, am just hoping that I can move to part-time work somewhere in my 60's. I'm hopeful, but it means keeping my current income levels for another 20 or so years, and avoiding any major health or other emergencies.

My prediction/hope is that the stereotype of millenials as relatively happy socialites will end up reversing, with them falling in with us burn-it-to-the-ground X'ers once they are old enough to realize how screwed they are.

Expanded consumer credit, and it's appurtenant high interest rate cost, would tend to keep young people less wealthy towards the last half of last century. As credit card debt skyrocketed, savings rates plummeted from almost 11% in 1982, to 1.5% in 2007 [0].

Similarly, the power of 401(k) investing is really only coming into it's own in the last decade or so, since 401(k) accounts have had 30 years to mature, total retirement assets now total well over $3 Trillion nationally.[1]

[0] http://www.americanhistoryusa.com/give-me-liberty-or-give-me...

[1] http://www.nber.org/bah/fall02/changingCharacter.html

I don't mean to SHOCK you, but did you know there's a massive age gap between young and old people? Also, an experience gap. Something Must Be Done About This!

I still remember how hard it was to build up enough credit to move beyond prepaid cellphones.

If young people want to increase their chances of being wealthy, one strategy is to emulate the behavior of older people: keeping an emergency fund, paying down debt, avoiding high-cost credit, and putting money into higher-returning investments

So the older you are the more time you have had to grow wealth. The younger you are the less time you have had. This is then forcibly tied into median family income?

this is huffington post tier article.

Perhaps our poor situation is just so obvious that, instead of mostly complaining, we're mostly fully resigned or preoccupied with fixing things in our own way. We are more Hero generation than Nomad, after all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...).

There will have to be a number of cut-backs in retirement benefits for future retirees, including means-testing, removing the maximum wage for Social Security contributions, and higher Medicare premiums.

I've felt millenials are the generation that feels the most helpless. Gen-X felt like they were promised something awesome and then screwed out of it. Millenials feel like they've got no chance to compete, so they don't expect it.

Gen-X resented the fact that they had to try so hard to win the rat race. Millenials know they have no hope of winning or even finishing, so the best they can hope for is to make the race more tolerable.

It's why you see things about how Millenials are more interested in comfort and work-life balance than straight up salary. Unlike the boomers who expected to work for a while and then retire on a nice nest-egg, and the Gen-Xers who struggled to meet an ever elusive goal of retirement, millenials don't have any expectation of retirement through normal means. They figure they're working forever, so they might as well get comfortable.

I mean, years ago I talked to gen-x'ers and there was a lot of dissatisfaction and a feeling of a loss of control and opportunities, but a lot of people who gave up on their dreams and settled for a job that they hate with a pension.

But with millenials, they're happy if they can take their 6 figure student loans and find any job at all, and a pension is a bizarre concept from a foreign world. They can't really hope to retire in the traditional sense, it's more like playing the lottery. There are some enterprising people who might make start-ups to try to get rich, but it's either get-rich or get-by, there's no sort of middle-class accumulation of wealth and a nice retirement at 65 any more. It's win big and buy a jet or eat spaghetti at home and avoid debt.

So if you have two jobs to choose from, neither with a salary that makes an early retirement seem a reality, and one makes life a little bit more tolerable, your decision is between a life spent (at least partially) working a more tolerable job, or a life spent working a less tolerable job. So you opt for the job that pays a bit less but gives you more leeway for work-life balance. Boomers see that as an irresponsible happy-go-lucky delay of retirement, while millenials feel that that retirement idea is not really feasible, and if you're going to be working forever, you might as well enjoy it. Gen-X kind of got stuck in the middle where they end up trying to work really hard at something they hate for the chance to get that retirement but keep getting the rug pulled out.

It's kind of like 3 people doing the limbo. The boomer plays, kind of bends a bit at the knees, leans his head back and gets under the stick. The Gen-X plays and when he first sees the bar it's nice and high, but as he gets closer and starts to go under the bar it keeps kind of getting lowered, so he keeps bending and contorting and struggling to get under the bar eventually. It hurts, but they still have hope they can get under it. The millenial looks at the bar, sitting ankle high and says fuck it and just decides to make the best of it on this side of the bar.

Then the boomers hear about the x'ers struggle and say just bend your knees and lean your head back, it's not so hard, nobody had trouble with it in our day and we didn't even go to college. Then the boomers hear about the millenials not even bothering to try to get under the bar and say "they're just fooling around, they aren't thinking about their future, they're never going to get under that bar unless they stop fooling around and try."

But the fact that the bar has moved is so often ignored. We're just all asked to bend further, and then blamed for not doing the impossible. The biggest difference between millenials and x'ers is that he millenials ARE aware of it, and that's why they can seem to be happy-go-lucky and less serious.

It's easy to motivate you to work hard when you might feel like you can retire early and live in comfort. It's a lot harder to motivate you to sacrifice a lot to work hard when it feels like there will be no end to that work, ever.

X'ers just got screwed because they got caught in the transition between easy future and no future.