Baby boomers and Gen-Xers often complain that millennials have it better than they did when they were growing up through the advent of technology and the digital age.
We, millennials, knew they were dead wrong, and now we have the evidence, especially when it comes to income inequality.
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In a new study published by the Equality of Opportunity Project titled “The Fading American Dream,” a child born into the average household in 1980 will have a 50 percent chance of making more money than his or her parents. Contrast that chance with a child born in 1940, where they had a 92 percent chance of accumulating more wealth than their parents.
That’s a 42-point drop in 40 years.
In the same study, researchers found that 2 in 5 millennial men born in the mid-80s grew up to earn as much at 30 as their father’s did at the same age.
One of the biggest themes of this year’s election was rising income inequality. The American Dream, known to economists as “absolute mobility,” which are the odds of a child earning more as an adult than his or her parents earned at the same age.
Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist who is one of the authors of the study, told the Washington Post that absolute mobility “is something that was a feature of the American economy for kids born around 1940, that baby boomer generation. As we look forward, there’s just been a dramatic decline in that measure.”
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on bringing back the American Dream to areas, like the Rust belt, that were affected by the disastrous trade policies that shipped manufacturing jobs overseas.
If he succeeds in bringing about more economic prosperity with higher wages by lifting burdensome federal regulations, then millennials will have a greater chance of earning more than their parents.
At this point, there’s nowhere to go but up.
