By Steve Roth
Wealth Economics
This picture from the Center for American Progress, and variations, have been making the rounds on the interwebs lately, eg here, here, and here. The headline is that younger households got 49% richer during/since Covid, in inflation-adjusted “real” terms.
But some drill-down is in order here. What actually happened? Start with background.
There are about 38 million households with under-40 heads of household — 30% of all households.
Those households only held 4% of total household net worth in 2019; that jumped to 6.5% in 2023. They definitely captured a bigger piece of the wealth pie, but the piece is still quite small.
Here are the nominal numbers (total, not per-household) from the DFAs1, CAP’s