George Walper, Spectrem’s president, said there’s been an uptick in the last few years in the number of respondents who cite inheritance as a factor in their wealth. To be fair, the very wealthy people surveyed by Spectrem also cite hard work, education, and smart investing as playing a role in their riches.
But it’s become harder to build a fortune on hard work alone. Americans in their late seventies, eighties, and nineties began their careers in the midst of the U.S.’s postwar boom. More recent generations haven’t had the same economic tailwinds.
The median family today is significantly poorer at any given age than their counterparts would have been 25 years earlier, according to the St. Louis Fed. For example, people born in 1970 have had about 40 percent less wealth at any given age, compared with people born in 1940 . The median middle-aged family in 2013 had 31 percent less wealth than its counterpart in 1989, while the median young family had 28 percent less wealth than its 1989 counterpart. Meanwhile, the median wealth gap between young and old families has widened.
As a result, the rich in the U.S. are an older crowd. It’s not necessarily surprising for young people to be poorer than old people. It takes a long time to develop valuable job skills—and even longer to pay off mortgages and stash money in a 401(k). The U.S., however, is unique in how much wealth is concentrated among its oldest citizens.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump said in his victory speech on the night of the election. But it’s not clear what the president-elect can or will do to affect the distribution of wealth across American society. While candidate Trump made ringing appeals to working-class voters, he also promised trillions of dollars in tax cuts, almost half aimed at the top 1 percent of U.S. by income.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.