July 29, 2015
In a Wonkblog post, Ana Swanson complained that people are not sufficiently worried about the wealth gap by age. This should rate high on the list of items for people not to worry about. The basic reason is simple, for most people wealth is not a very good measure of their well-being and furthermore, the meaning of “wealth” has changed substantially over time.
If that sounds strange, let me make it simpler. If we go back thirty years, most middle income retirees could count on getting a substantial amount of retirement income from a defined benefit pension. Today that is much less likely to be the case. This means that to maintain the same standard of living in retirement, someone reaching retirement age would need much more wealth today than was true thirty years ago. They are also likely to need considerably more money, relative to their income, to cover health care costs since Medicare covers a much smaller share of health care costs today than it did thirty years ago. For this reason, the sort of comparison of the wealth of retirees or near retirees shown in the figures in this blog are not very useful for showing trends in wealth through time.
There is a similar story for young people. Young people never had much wealth so whether a 30-year-old has 40 percent more or less of a net worth of $8,000 is not going to mean much for their life’s prospects. Furthermore, measured wealth may actually be inversely related to a young person’s economic prospects. While someone who accrued $30,000 in student loan debt getting a degree (or possibly not getting a degree) from Corinthian College is in bad shape, a person who ran up $150,000 in debt getting a Harvard MBA is likely to do just fine.
For these reasons, the wealth of young people is not a very useful measure. We can look at their income and see how that has changed over time. That does not look good for high school grads, nor even people with a college degree. This should provide a serious basis for concern about the economic well-being of the young, much more so than their lack of wealth.
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