Rogé Karma

And I think all of the statistics you just brought up are absolutely accurate.

I hear the same ones from economists all the time.

The same economists are emailing both of us.

Yes, the same economists are emailing both of us.

And I think it is very hard.

It is very obvious as a journalist when you are looking at what stories get the most clicks to know that when you write about something, things that are alarming that are happening to young college graduates, people flock to those stories.

It is a story that a lot of us, I think, want to believe.

I think that has caused this narrative to get over-torqued.

That said, I want to complicate at least one of those statistics a little bit.

And I feel like so much of this conversation is going to end up revolving around the ways that statistics can be mirages and the ways that they can be actually more complicated.

And so basically, it actually was true that for most of the Great Recession, when you looked at wealth statistics...

young people really were behind, right?

It was in 2016, the St.

Louis Fed came out with a study basically showing that millennials at their age were about 34% behind in terms of aggregate wealth, the generations above them at that age.

What has happened though is over the last 10 years, that gap has closed and now millennials are actually, like you said, wealthier.

But you have to understand that a huge part of that closure was the appreciation of home prices that happened between 2019 and 2022.

So over those, during the pandemic, right, you see home prices increase at some of their fastest rates in history.

It's something like 40% in the matter of a few years.

That means that millennials who own homes already saw collectively $2.5 trillion in paper wealth being created over those years.

And that has opened up what has been described to me as like the single greatest divide within the millennial generation and within Gen Z is if you bought a house before 2020 or you bought a house after 2020.