AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

Not all Americans are in those three generations, certainly not in 1990 when it started. In 2019 maybe 3% of the population was older than boomers, and maybe 15% were younger than millennials.

Here's the article it comes from.

One big issue is that the generations aren't the same size. The article explains:

So we can say that in 1990, boomers owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth and represented 31 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.68 — each percentage point of the total U.S. population represented by boomers, in other words, owned 0.68 percent of the wealth.

In 2008, on the other hand, Gen Xers owned 9 percent of the wealth and made up 22 percent of the population, for a wealth-to-population ratio of 0.41.

That’s a smaller generational deficit than the raw numbers suggest, but it’s still a significant one. It illustrates the size of the financial hole today’s young adults are in relative to their parents. It’s a hole they’ll never truly be able to dig out of, given the way that money draws other money to itself via the gravitational pull of compound interest: The less money you start out with, the less you’ll make during the rest of your life.

In addition to the problem of different generations having different percentages of a shifting population denominator, the graph also has to deal with a shifting wealth denominator. Americans cumulatively were much wealthier in 2019 than 1990.

Plus, the interesting thing is that since this chart ends in 2019, the stock market and housing prices have boomed. Millennial wealth tripled between 2019 and 2024:

In the first quarter of 2024, the collective wealth of millennials and older Gen Z stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.

As it stands, the richest millennials are some of the richest young people the world has ever seen. Zuckerberg is on the older end of the millennial range. Taylor Swift is right in the middle. Not everyone has seen that kind of wealth, but for each billionaire there are thousands of millionaires who became immensely wealthy in some other way.

It's not a super robust methodology. I'd definitely correct for population size, and maybe just show raw wealth numbers by age to get a sense of whether one generation is or isn't on track. Boomers' percentages were elevated by just how poor the silent generation and greatest generation were, after the Great Depression and World War 2 in their prime earning years.