Louis asked whether Americans born in the 1980s would become a “lost generation.” Two years earlier, the typical household headed by someone from that decade had 34 percent less wealth than earlier generations’ experience predicted for its age. Fast-forward to 2024 and two of the same researchers ran the numbers again. By 2022, the typical 1980s household held 37 percent more wealth than the benchmark.
This surprising reversal has done little to dislodge the belief that millennials are the first American generation to do worse than their parents. That belief was built on data gathered at low points. And they were pretty low: the sluggish recovery after the 2008 global financial crisis and the first shock of the pandemic.
Measured against earlier generations at the same age, millennials now earn more and, by several measures, have caught up on wealth. The exception is the milestone the old story got right: owning a home. The pessimism was not imagined by a generation that defines itself by anxieties and overthinking.
It comes from serious research. Economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that roughly 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 earned more at 30 than their parents had at the same age. For those born in the 1980s, it was a coin flip.
Louis Fed’s 2018 study supplied the wealth side of millennials’ sorry tale. Of the six birth cohorts it tracked, only the 1980s group lost further ground between 2010 and 2016, even as rising asset prices lifted older families. Its members carried unusually heavy debts—student, auto, and credit card loans that bought no appreciating assets—and so missed the rebound in homes and stocks.
By January 2020, CNN was reporting in glum tones that many millennials were worse off than their parents, “a first in American history.” Then the pandemic struck. That spring, The Washington Post labeled them “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history,” calculating that no other had seen slower economic growth after entering the workforce. The damage, it predicted, would follow them for life: in their earnings, their wealth, and their path to owning a home.
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