Rogé Karma

Because if you bought a house before 2020, you locked in low interest rates and you just watched the value of your home go up incredibly fast.

If you did not buy a home, you now feel more locked out of the housing market than ever before.

And so I think that is a really important dynamic here that you have, even though you have an aggregate, millennials are more wealthy at their age than other generations, you actually have much more inequality within the millennial generation than previous generations.

There was another statistic.

If you look at the difference between the 80th percentile wealthiest millennials

the top fifth, basically, of wealthiest millennials and the bottom fifth, that gap for the baby boomers was about $250,000.

For millennials, that gap, even inflation adjusted, is about $350,000.

So one thing you might be seeing, even though there's a broad-based pessimism, is that you are seeing a particular deleterious effect for those who don't have a home.

One last point I will make that I think is actually also will complicate this a little bit more

The way that the wealth statistics are calculated is they are calculated at the household level, which means if you are a millennial or a Gen Zer that is living with your parents, you are actually not included in the data set as a Gen Zer millennial.

So think about which young people, this is very similar to the point before about unemployment and employment rates.

It's survivorship bias.

Right, yeah, there it is.

This is often known as survivorship bias.

The people that are arguably the least well-off in the millennial and Gen Z generations are the people living with their parents.

Young people are living with their parents at about 50% higher rate today than they were in 1989, 30 years ago.

And those individuals are actually not being included in these statistics at all.

I reached out, when I discovered this,

I reached out to the economist Jeremy Horpital, who is great at doing – on everything wealth.

And he was able to do a calculation for me where he showed that if you try to account for this by lowering the median to try to account for a lot of these dropouts, these folks living with their parents who aren't being counted –