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by paulpauper·16d ago·view on hn ↗
Gen X and millennials are ahead of boomers on per capita wealth at the same age

This runs counter to the popular media narrative of poor millennials, but it makes sense. Millennials rose a tailwind of surging stock prices since the '09 bottom, fat white-collar salaries (such as in tech, consulting, finance), and surging home pries, buoyed by cheap mortgages from 2010-2022 thanks to 14 years of near-zero interest rates.

Even when taking into account student loan debt, white-collar workers still earn much more compared to in the 70s-early 2000s. 6 figure salaries for white-collar jobs were uncommon even in the early 2000s whereas they are commonplace today.

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Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.
Why do you think it will be low cost operation rather than highly paid specialized talent (but only very few of them)?

If AI becomes a widespread job displacer, I think we’re going to see an amplification of the value of talent. If you think there’s 2x or 10x talent now, you might find there’s 10x or 50x talent with AI.

I think it's reasonable to expect amplification but I am not sure how reasonable it would be to expect sustainable amplification. I feel that AI removes the meaning from work and with that gone we eventually start loosing the talent.

And 0 talent by 10 ( or even 50 ) is a fucking 0!

Let's not assume that 6 figure salary is close to 999,999. In reality it's closer to 100,001.

And when you factor in inflation and increased housing cost the comparison starts to differ greatly.

Millennials have it pretty tough.

$100k is and was a historically high salary, especially when millennials were entering the job market (~1999-2018). Inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars, that's $132-200k. Median adult full-time income is $60-72k.
I think every generation would self-report that they had it pretty tough.

I remember my (Boomer) school teacher parents sitting at the kitchen table with an LED calculator adding up their bills and making sure they could make ends meet or getting blocks of government cheese for some reason (that made great grilled cheese, BTW).

Was it 10% easier for them than Millennials? Maybe. Was it 50% or 100% easier? I don’t think so.