One thing these kinds of articles that are designed to stoke generational conflicts never mention is that rich people live longer. Like, obviously older people would be proportionally richer, the poorer people from that generation are dead. Also, friendly reminder, all this stoking of generational conflicts does is distract us from the real divide in society.
Regardless of the electoral politics, as Chris notes, the important challenge in social policy is helping people who won’t benefit from wealth transfers from wealthy relatives, rather than engaging in fantasies about “generational warfare”. What matters is not generations, but class.
Older people tend to be richer because they’ve had more time to earn and save money. Compare a 20-year-old to a 40-year-old. Both spent about 20 years being a kid, growing up and going to school, but the 40-year-old had an extra 20 years after that to earn and save money. You can do the same comparison between a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old, but take all the money the 60-year-old earned in the first 20 years of working and invest it in the stock market for the next 20 years, while also continuing to work.
Wealth can build like crazy. If you invest at 7% average annual return, you’ll double your money in just over 10 years. At 10% the doubling period is just over 7 years. Now consider that the S&P 500 had an average annualized return over 10% between 1957 and 2023, and that 60-year-old’s 20 year investment would multiply by 6.7x.
Couldn’t agree more, though I would say it also distracts from the need to highly regulate capitalism at large, i.e. encourage reinvestment in employees (pay at least in line with inflation, training, etc) over shareholder dividends or CEO bonuses
This is relevant so not just those at the very top (irrespective of generation) will benefit from economic growth
One thing these kinds of articles that are designed to stoke generational conflicts never mention is that rich people live longer. Like, obviously older people would be proportionally richer, the poorer people from that generation are dead. Also, friendly reminder, all this stoking of generational conflicts does is distract us from the real divide in society.
Older people tend to be richer because they’ve had more time to earn and save money. Compare a 20-year-old to a 40-year-old. Both spent about 20 years being a kid, growing up and going to school, but the 40-year-old had an extra 20 years after that to earn and save money. You can do the same comparison between a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old, but take all the money the 60-year-old earned in the first 20 years of working and invest it in the stock market for the next 20 years, while also continuing to work.
Wealth can build like crazy. If you invest at 7% average annual return, you’ll double your money in just over 10 years. At 10% the doubling period is just over 7 years. Now consider that the S&P 500 had an average annualized return over 10% between 1957 and 2023, and that 60-year-old’s 20 year investment would multiply by 6.7x.
Couldn’t agree more, though I would say it also distracts from the need to highly regulate capitalism at large, i.e. encourage reinvestment in employees (pay at least in line with inflation, training, etc) over shareholder dividends or CEO bonuses
This is relevant so not just those at the very top (irrespective of generation) will benefit from economic growth