Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars to throw at something that may or may not work while working people can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to their health insurance company only to have claims denied is insane.
This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each year.
The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move the capital one direction: up to the people who needed the labor of others to reach such wealth.
I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you should not assume your experience generalizes.
This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn...
Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than previous generations were at [our] age" [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...
That being said, it seems to reference property owners. Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind these was to make the company attractive to buyers. Eventually, they did find one: Oracle. They've since gutted what was a major employer for my region.
Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay hasn't kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while economic output has risen, along with COL [0].
Where'd all of the value go?
(that's a rhetorical question)
[0]https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-costs-...
Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age adjusted, in generations. (Anecdote: am Millenial. Own a home. Most of my friends do, too. Yes, it's a bubble, but it's a big one.)
> Where'd all of the value go?...(that's a rhetorical question)
No, it's not. It went to the people who bought houses. Including between 2019 and 2024.
Which generation's mode reached home-buying age in that interval, an interval also generously sprinkled with massive stimulus, a stock-market boom and forced consumption-reduction through stay-at-home orders? (That is a rhetorical question.)
Age-adjusted?
So if you take out the fact that it took up more of the one resource that matters more than anything else to become property owners, then, yes, Millennials have more of it.
Which is kind of proving my point.
Ask before assuming.
Age adjusted means taking each generation when they were the same age, how wealthy were they? A Boomer today is wealthier than a Millenial because they've had more time to accumulate. But when a Boomer was Millenial-aged, she had on average less wealth than a Millenial today.
If you have more wealth, you can theoretically purchase more goods and services than if you had less.
The exception to this, of course, is if the goods and services cost more, and for things that you need to exist in American society (healthcare, education, transportation, housing, food), those things generally cost several times more for younger people than they did, "age-adjusted", when their parents were the same age, often with a difference that is more than that in wealth. That's why wages have been flat.
There's also the question of how that wealth is distributed among the generations and how it's stored. If the property-owning Millennial owns a few rental properties that their peers have to pay to live in, the "average" properties owned by the group can be the same (or even higher) but the number of people those properties are spread among is lower.
There's also the fact that lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock markets as people need to participate in those markets with their 401(k)s to be able to retire some day. You can't sleep in a stock certificate, but if you want to have any savings, it's easier to enter the equities market than it is to get into real estate from a startup cost perspective. People are having to compromise the "stability" of their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more abstract definitions of wealth.
Which is why these figures have been inflation adjusted.
> lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock markets
Pretty sure Boomers hold more stocks than Millenials. This is an argument for Millenials being even better off than the statistics show.
> People are having to compromise the "stability" of their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more abstract definitions of wealth
Yes. But that doesn't broadly describe Millenials, and it describes more people in older generations when they were present Millenials' ages.
You're trying to argue against facts with philosophy.
It is a fact that wages have remained stagnant for four decades.
It's also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between rich and poor, and that's what's distorting the figures you're citing. That's the only way, mathematically, you see wages remain flat while seeing wealth rise.
Look deeper at your facts, instead of letting them be tainted by your philosophy.
First is sort of correct for a very specific slice of America, those just above the welfare cut off. (For whom real wages have been flat to negative, assuming we scale up housing preferences and add in costs that didn’t make sense before, e.g. internet and cell-phone bills.) The second—about rising inequality—is true throughout.
Neither advances your argument, however—one can better off while others are much better off, and most in a population can be better off while some are worse off. (Observe the median Millenial and the statistics stand. Millenials are rich, in part because we’re going to stick Gen Alpha with the bill.)