Baby Boomers saved and earned — don’t blame them if you failed

Batya Ungar-Sargon recently argued in The Hill that Americans born right after World War II — the “Baby Boomers,” as we call them — are helping cause high prices, scarce housing and expensive health care for the young. Boomers, who have spent their lives working and saving, have benefited from rising stock and home values, gaining an economic security from which the young are excluded.

This is a popular theme, and one that is not without a kernel of truth. Boomers do indeed have much to answer for. They allowed our government to go too deeply into debt, they failed to fight for better public education and they endorsed the wrong-headed idea of college for all.

But the fact that the Boomers became wealthy is not one of the things for which they should be blamed. Indeed, their hard work, savings and investments provided the labor and capital that propelled our nation’s economic growth through the turn of the century. Younger Americans should actually be thanking Boomers for their contribution.

The Millennial generation initially fell behind on reaching key financial goals. This was mainly because many of them came of age during or after the Great Recession. But a St. Louis Federal Reserve study has shown that by early 2024, Millennials and older Gen Zers had, adjusted for inflation, roughly 25 percent more wealth than Gen Xers and Boomers had at a similar age.

Moreover, analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that the median household net worth of older Millennials more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. For young Millennials born in the 1990s, the gains were even greater.

The Fed data further show that the wealth of Millennials and older Gen Zers, as of early 2024, “stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier.” This was driven up mainly by real estate and the value of retirement accounts.

Many Millennials think they were wronged by oldsters because they stubbornly refuse to move out of their homes, leading to higher housing prices that make homeownership difficult for young families. But that people forget is that housing was even tougher back when Boomers were starting families. In the early 1980s, mortgage rates were as high as 18 percent. This made purchasing a home “ more expensive in today’s dollars ” than it is to buy today, according to an economist analyzing the housing industry.

Admittedly, the Federal Reserve reports that “between 2022 and 2025, the real net worth of the average American family rose by only 2 percent,” whereas the net worth of older and wealthier people “skyrocketed by more than 30 percent.” But the reason for this disparity is that older people spent long lives putting money aside and plowing those funds into appreciating assets.

As The Wall Street Journal explains , Boomers “tend to be more invested than others in the stock market, which has boomed in recent years.” The S&P 500 rose by nearly 80 percent over the three years between the end of 2022 and the end of 2025. As I write this, it is up another 12 percent so far in 2026.

It is easy to blame Boomers for enjoying 40 percent growth in the value of their assets, even as the young watched their net worth decrease. But those Boomers were able to build wealth in large part because they had spent decades working, living within their means and saving.

Born into the post-war period, some Boomers carried forward the savings-focused, Depression-era mindsets of their parents. Many of them went to college, climbed the corporate ladder and gradually saw their earnings and savings increase. The ones that didn’t go to college took blue-collar jobs, often joined unions, saved up to buy homes and cared for their families.

Millennials and Gen Z — collectively those born between 1981 and 2012 — have demonstrated less enthusiasm for such arduous paths and tend to be more concerned about “work-life balance.” Employers often voice frustration with these younger cohorts for being less willing to work hard and for being more disparaging of the corporate hierarchy.

And it is not their imagination. Surveys show that work ethic dropped between the Boomers and the Millennials. It briefly picked up with Gen Z but then collapsed after COVID. According to one study , 54 percent of 18-year-olds said in 2020 that they were “willing to work overtime.” By 2022, that number had plunged to 36 percent — “an all-time low in the 46-year history of the survey.”

According to ongoing surveys from Monitoring the Future, almost 40 percent of 12th graders in the 1970s said they expected work to be a “central part of life.” By 2022, that portion had plummeted to less than 20 percent. And Gallup reported in 2023 that “the stories you read about ‘quiet quitting,’ the tendency to do just what the job requires and nothing more, which arose after the pandemic, appear to be real.”

Yet oddly, just as young people became disillusioned with the workplace, their fortunes improved. In 2024, the Economist published a piece titled, “Generation Z is Unprecedently Rich,” noting that “pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13 percent year on year, compared with 6 percent for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest ‘young person premium’ since reliable data began.”

To be sure, Boomers had a hand in creating the Millennials’ economic anxiety. Towering student debt is a real issue, caused largely by a misguided and single-minded determination that everyone should go to college. The gigantic government-led push to fund higher education, irrespective of the subjects studied, aptitude and future earnings potential caused tuitions to soar and saddled many graduates with crippling debt. As we now experience a shortage of skilled workers in this country, that folly is ever more apparent.

But when it comes to the Boomers’ hard-earned prosperity, the grievances of the younger set look more like Bernie Sanders’s class warfare than anything resembling economic reality. Perhaps we will soon hear them chanting in the streets, “Tax the old!”

Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.