Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHChildren born in 1946 had an 86 percent chance of out-earning their parents. Children born in 1980 got a coin flip. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 family survey shows the age gap in wealth opening back up, and New Hampshire, the third-oldest state by median age, shows the split as clearly as anywhere.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump came down an escalator at Trump Tower in New York, announced he was running for president, and pronounced a death. “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” he said, according to the transcript TIME published that day. He promised to bring it back bigger and stronger than before.
It was a campaign line. It was also a claim about the world, and claims about the world can be tested. One of the clearest tests economists have built is a simple one: what share of American children grow up to earn more than their parents did at the same age? Run that test by birth year, and a pattern appears that the slogan skipped. The dream did not die all at once. It thinned out cohort by cohort, and the first year of the baby boom, Trump’s year, sits near the top of the curve. He was born June 14, 1946. Of the children born that year, 86 percent went on to out-earn their parents. Of the children born in 1980, half did.
The American dream, measured the way researchers measure it, is not dead. It has been rationed by birth year. The odds of climbing past your parents fell from about nine in ten to about one in two over four decades of births, and the wealth that the high-odds years built sits mostly with the people who were born into them. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances, released October 9, 2026, shows the youngest families losing ground and the oldest pulling further ahead. New Hampshire, the third-oldest state in the country by median age in the 2024 census survey, shows the same split in sharper relief.
Related coverage. This piece is part of GSR’s Generations Series. Did the Baby Boomers Screw the Millennials? ran the first data check on the boomer-millennial argument; The Boomer Receipt tallied what the postwar tailwind built; New Hampshire Needs Young Workers. It Built a State They Can’t Afford. priced the front door in this state; and Everyone Gets a Fresh Start but You followed student debt through bankruptcy law. This piece adds the cohort-by-cohort mobility record, the Fed’s 2025 survey and its second-quarter 2026 wealth data, and 2010 and 2024 New Hampshire census tables. Earlier pieces quoted Fed wealth shares from 2025 quarters; the shares here are from the second quarter of 2026, so the numbers differ by design.
What the dream measures
The phrase “American dream” means different things to different people: a house, a pension, a college degree, a life better than the one your parents had. Economists needed one number they could track across generations, and in 2016 a team led by Raj Chetty, then at Stanford, published one. Their paper, “The Fading American Dream,” appeared in the journal Science the following year. It measures absolute income mobility: the fraction of children whose family income at age 30, spouses’ earnings combined and adjusted for inflation, exceeds their parents’ family income at the same age.
The measure is deliberately blunt. It does not ask whether a child climbed the ranks relative to everyone else. It asks whether that child, in plain dollars, did better than Mom and Dad. That is close to how most families talk about the dream at the kitchen table, which is why it matters. The researchers built it by linking Census and Current Population Survey records for older cohorts with de-identified federal tax records for more recent ones, covering children born from 1940 through 1984. They posted every number online through Opportunity Insights, the research group that maintains the tables, and every mobility figure below comes from those tables.
One more thing about method. The study measures income at 30, so its last data point is the class born in 1984, who turned 30 in 2014. Nobody yet has the comparable number for Gen Z or for younger millennials. Where this piece says anything about those cohorts, it uses other evidence and says so.
The Silent Generation: the 90 percent years
Start at the top of the chart. Of American children born in 1940, 91.5 percent grew up to out-earn their parents. Across the birth years 1940 through 1945, the tail end of what the Federal Reserve calls the Silent Generation and earlier, the average was 89 percent. In New Hampshire, the estimate for the 1940 cohort was 93 percent.
There is a reason those numbers were so high, and it is not that the parents of 1940 were lazy. Those children were born at the end of the Depression and the start of the war, to parents whose own incomes had been held down by both. They came of age in the postwar boom, when growth reached families up and down the income scale. A child of 1940 who did merely as well, relative to the rest of the country, as his parents had done was almost guaranteed to beat them in dollars, because the whole floor was rising. The bar was low and the escalator was moving.
That point matters for everything that follows. High absolute mobility is partly a gift of timing. It rewards a generation for being born to poorer parents into a fast-growing economy. Nobody earned the year they were born. The question this piece keeps asking is a different one: once the escalator slowed, who kept the gains, and what did they do with them?
The boomers: the slide started inside their own generation
Here is where the boomer story gets more complicated than the meme. The baby boom runs from 1946 through 1964, and the odds of out-earning your parents fell, with one small bump, across those nineteen birth years. Children born in 1946 had 85.8 percent. Children born in 1955 had 69.6 percent. Children born in 1964, the last boomer year, had 56.5 percent. Averaged across the whole boom, the odds were 70 percent.
So the boomers did not all ride the same wave. The oldest boomers, Trump’s cohort, mostly finished school in the 1960s and started working before the inflation of the 1970s. The youngest boomers came of age in the early 1980s recession with odds that look much more like Gen X. A New Hampshire resident born in 1964 faced a very different market at 30 than a neighbor born in 1946. Lumping them together hides that.
It also explains why the oldest boomers make such an easy symbol. When Trump said the dream had died, he was speaking as a member of the luckiest birth year of the entire baby boom. Most people born in his cohort did better than their parents, because the floor under them rose so fast. That is not a personal accusation. It is a description of where on the curve he stood when he declared the curve flat.
Gen X: the flat line
The Federal Reserve defines Generation X as people born from 1965 through 1980. On the Chetty chart, their stretch looks less like a slide and more like a plateau. The odds hovered around 58 to 61 percent from the mid-1960s into the early 1970s, then drifted down. The 1972 cohort had 60.8 percent. By 1979 the number was 54.3 percent, and the 1980 cohort hit the bottom of the series at 50.0 percent. Across the whole of Gen X, the average was about 58 percent.
Gen X tends to drop out of the generational shouting match, and the data shows why. Its members were neither the clear winners nor the clearest losers on income mobility. On wealth, the picture is different. The Fed’s distributional accounts show Gen X holding 25.7 percent of all U.S. household net worth in the second quarter of 2026, about $47.7 trillion. That share peaked at 26.3 percent at the end of 2025 and slipped over the next two quarters, but Gen X was moving into the peak wealth years of 55 to 69 in 2026, and it is next in line for the boomers’ place at the top of the wealth table.
Millennials: the coin flip
The study’s last four cohorts, 1981 through 1984, are the first millennial years. The odds of out-earning your parents ranged from 50.3 to 54.3 percent across those years. The 1984 cohort, the last one measured, came in at 50.3 percent. New Hampshire’s estimate for children born in 1980, the last cohort the study reports by state, was 51.0 percent. Either way, that is a coin flip.
A coin flip is not death. Half of these children did better than their parents, and many did much better. But the shift from nine in ten to one in two changes what a family can assume. The parents of a child born in 1945 could say that working hard would almost certainly produce a better material life than the one at home; the odds were 86 percent. The parents of a child born in 1984 could promise a coin flip. The dream became a gamble with even odds, and the millennials who placed that bet were between 30 and 45 years old in 2026.
Gen Z: no score yet
The youngest adults, born roughly from the late 1990s on, have no absolute-mobility score because they have not reached 30. Anyone who tells you how Gen Z will fare on that measure is guessing. What exists instead is a snapshot of young families in 2025, and it is covered below: the Federal Reserve’s 2025 family survey, which sorts households by the age of the person it calls the reference person, puts the youngest millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z in the same under-35 bracket.
The Fed’s quarterly wealth accounts fold the two groups together as well, labeling everyone born in 1981 or later as millennials. That combined group held 11.2 percent of U.S. household net worth in the second quarter of 2026, about $20.8 trillion. Separating Gen Z out of those accounts is not possible with the published data, so every figure in this piece for people born after 1980 covers both.
The scorecard, generation by generation
Put the two federal datasets side by side and each generation gets a line on the same ledger: the odds that people born in its measured years out-earned their parents, the share of the nation’s household wealth it held in mid-2026, and the share of household debt it carries. The mobility column covers only the birth years the Chetty study measured, which means the Silent Generation’s figure reflects only 1940 through 1945 and the millennial figure only 1981 through 1984.
| Generation (Fed birth years) | Odds of out-earning parents | Share of U.S. household wealth, 2026:Q2 | Share of U.S. household debt, 2026:Q2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silent and earlier (before 1946) | 89% (born 1940–45) | 10.7% | 2.1% |
| Baby boomers (1946–1964) | 70% | 52.5% | 20.8% |
| Gen X (1965–1980) | 58% | 25.7% | 34.5% |
| Millennials and younger (1981 or later) | 50–54% (born 1981–84) | 11.2% | 42.6% |
| Mobility: GSR averages of Opportunity Insights cohort estimates. Wealth and debt: Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts. Gen Z has no mobility score yet and is counted inside the Fed’s 1981-or-later group. | |||
Is the drop real, or a trick of the numbers?
Is the decline statistically significant? The question deserves a straight answer, because “statistically significant” has a specific meaning and it gets thrown around loosely.
The Chetty estimates are not drawn from a small sample with a margin of error in the usual sense. The recent cohorts come from de-identified federal tax records, and the older ones from large Census files. So the answer is not a p-value. The uncertainty that matters here comes from two other places, and the researchers measured both.
The first is a missing link. For children born before 1980, no dataset ties each child’s income to a specific parent’s income, so the researchers had to assume which parents went with which children. Their key technical result is that for the earliest cohorts, the assumption barely matters. Incomes grew so fast at every level between 1940 and 1970 that almost every child out-earned even the best-paid parents of the previous generation. Searching across every plausible way of pairing parents and children, the 1940 cohort’s rate stays between 84 and 98 percent. For the 1946 cohort, by GSR’s reading of the same table, the range is 72 to 97 percent. The floor of that range, 72 percent, is higher than the baseline estimate for every cohort born in 1953 or later. For the 1984 cohort, the same search spans 14 to 88 percent, but there the pairing does not need to be assumed, because it is observed directly in tax records.
The second source of uncertainty is measurement choices: which inflation index you use, whether you count taxes and government transfers, whether you adjust for the fact that families got smaller. The researchers tested those choices too, and the published sensitivity table lets anyone check.
GSR ran the numbers from that table. It carries 36 alternative versions of the estimate for each birth year. Fifteen of them change how income and prices are measured: seven price indexes, income after taxes and after transfers, income at age 40 instead of 30, three ways of adjusting for household size, and two alternative income definitions. For the 1946 cohort, those fifteen produce estimates from 73 to 92 percent. For the 1980 cohort, the fourteen available for that year produce estimates from 47 to 71 percent. The lowest 1946 figure, income at age 40, still sits above the highest 1980 figure, income divided by household size. The remaining columns change the question rather than the measurement: a child earning 10 or 20 percent more, or less, than the parents; immigrants included in every year; parents measured at ages 25 to 35; a single data source for both generations; and fixed dollar amounts added to children’s incomes, a test the paper describes in its own sensitivity section. Thirty-three of the 36 columns report both cohorts, and in every one of the 33 the 1946 cohort beats the 1980 cohort, by at least 10 points. The paper also reports the median ratio of a child’s income to the parents’: about 3 for children born in 1940, slightly under 1 for children born in 1984.
The household-size adjustment deserves a closer look, because it is the strongest argument on the other side. Families in 1980 were smaller than families in 1946. When the researchers divide income by the number of people in the household, the 1980 cohort’s odds rise as high as 71 percent. That means some of the decline reflects smaller households splitting a paycheck fewer ways. It does not erase the decline. On that same adjustment, the 1980 cohort still trails the 1946 cohort by about 18 points, 71 percent to 89 percent, and the authors write that this most conservative adjustment still shows a 26-point fall across the full series.
The Fed’s 2025 survey is a different kind of evidence. It is a sample survey of families, so every number carries sampling error, and the Fed publishes standard errors only for its all-family totals. A 23 percent drop over three years in one age group is a real reported change, but it is a single interval, not a trend. The Fed attributes most of it to the unwinding of business-equity gains that young families posted between 2019 and 2022. Read it as a warning light, not a verdict.
Who holds the wealth now
Income mobility tells you whether a generation got ahead of its parents. Wealth tells you who kept what. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts divide the country’s household balance sheet by generation every quarter, going back to 1989. The release dated September 18, 2026, runs through the second quarter of 2026, and every wealth share in this piece comes from it.
In that quarter, baby boomers held 52.5 percent of all U.S. household net worth, about $97.4 trillion. Gen X held 25.7 percent. Everyone born in 1981 or later held 11.2 percent. The Silent Generation and everyone older held 10.7 percent. A single generation, born over nineteen years, owns more than everyone else in the country combined.
What they own, and what they owe
The composition of those holdings matters as much as the total. In the second quarter of 2026, boomers held 41.3 percent of the value of owner-occupied real estate in the country and 54.5 percent of corporate stocks and mutual funds held outside retirement accounts. They also held 57.2 percent of the value of traditional defined-benefit pension entitlements, the kind that pays a set monthly check in retirement.
Now flip the ledger. The group the Fed labels millennials, everyone born in 1981 or later, held 11.2 percent of the wealth but 42.6 percent of all household liabilities. That included 43.3 percent of home-mortgage debt and 46.3 percent of consumer credit, the Fed’s category for credit cards, auto loans, and student loans. Boomers carried 20.8 percent of household liabilities. The generation with a little over a tenth of the wealth is carrying more than two-fifths of the debt.
Some of that is normal. Young adults borrow to buy their first house and their first car, and pay it down over time. Boomers carried heavy mortgages at the same age too. The difference is the starting point: a house priced at 4.75 times income instead of 3.57, on top of a student loan for a degree whose price index had more than tripled in real terms since 1978. Debt is a bet on future income. The Chetty data says the odds of that future income beating the last generation’s are now about even.
The Fed’s 2025 family survey adds a stress reading. One family in five carried a student loan in 2025, with a median balance of $25,600. And the share of all families whose debt payments ate more than 40 percent of their income rose from 6.5 percent in 2022 to 8.6 percent in 2025, the largest share since 2010, according to the report. The report does not break that figure out by age.
The obvious objection is age. Older people should have more wealth. They have had decades to pay down mortgages and build retirement accounts, and a 70-year-old with a paid-off house is supposed to be richer than a 32-year-old renter. Any honest comparison has to match people at the same stage of life.
The Fed’s accounts allow that, too, because they also split wealth by the age of the household head. In the third quarter of 1989, households headed by someone under 40 held 12.0 percent of the nation’s net worth. In the second quarter of 2026, households in that same age bracket held 6.5 percent. Over the same span, households headed by someone 70 or older went from 18.9 percent to 33.6 percent.
That comparison is cleaner, but it is not perfect, and you should know its weak spot. The country itself got older between 1989 and 2026. There are more households headed by older people than there used to be, so some of the shift in shares reflects a bigger crowd of elders, not just richer ones. The Fed’s family-level survey answers that objection directly, because it reports what a typical family at each age owns.
The 2025 survey: the young fell back, the old pulled ahead
On October 9, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board released its 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances, the triennial survey it has run in consistent form since 1989. All figures in the report are in 2025 dollars. The headline numbers looked fine. Median family net worth rose 2 percent from 2022, to $215,900, and mean net worth rose 7 percent, to $1.24 million.
The age breakdown told a different story. Families headed by someone under 35 saw median net worth fall 23 percent, to $33,000. Families headed by someone 75 or older saw median net worth climb 37 percent, to $504,900. The Fed noted that the oldest group held the largest net worth of any age bracket in 2025, ahead of families who are nearly or recently retired, which had not been true in the previous few surveys.
Do the division. In 2025, the median family headed by someone 75 or older was worth about 15 times as much as the median family headed by someone under 35. Three years earlier, by the same report’s inflation-adjusted figures, the multiple was about 8.6. The gap between the oldest and youngest families grew by more than three-quarters in a single survey cycle.
Here is the counterweight, and it matters. The 2022 survey had shown young families posting a huge jump from 2019, a 143 percent rise in median net worth, and the oldest families’ multiple over the youngest had been about 18 before that jump. Converting the 2019 figure into 2025 dollars, the typical young family in 2025 still held nearly twice what its counterpart held in 2019. So the 2025 survey shows the young giving back part of an unusual windfall, not falling to a new low. Both things are true. Young families are better off than before the pandemic, and the distance between them and the oldest families, which narrowed sharply during the pandemic, has opened back up.
The survey’s income table makes the same point from the other side. Families under 35 reported a median income of $67,800 in 2025, up 2 percent from 2022. They earned a little more and kept less.
There is one more finding in the 2025 survey that belongs in this account, because it shows young families doing what they are told. Participation in defined-contribution plans and individual retirement accounts among families under 35 jumped from 42 percent in 2016 to near 50 percent in 2025, the starkest increase of any age group, according to the Fed. Lower-income young families made up a growing share of those savers. The average balance for young families who held such accounts dipped between 2022 and 2025, to $48,400, while balances rose for every older group the Fed listed. The young are saving. They are starting from further back, and their balances are smaller.
The price of the front door
Housing is where the generational split shows up in daily life. The Census Bureau tracks homeownership by age every quarter. In the second quarter of 2026, 35.2 percent of householders under 35 owned their homes. Among householders 65 and older, it was 78.6 percent. The highest annual average for under-35 householders in that Census series, which begins in 1994, was 43.1 percent in 2004, during the lending bubble that ended in the 2008 crash. The Fed’s family survey tells the longer story for all ages: a homeownership rate of 63.9 percent in 1989, a peak of 69.1 percent in 2004, and 65.6 percent in 2025.
The buyers who do get in are getting in later. The National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found first-time buyers made up 21 percent of purchases, a record low, and their median age reached 40, according to the association’s release and trade coverage of it. Repeat buyers had a median age of 62. A trade association’s survey of its own transactions is not a government statistic, and this piece treats those figures as the Realtors’ findings.
Why later? Start with price against income. GSR divided the Census Bureau’s median sales price for new homes by the Census median household income, both published through the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database, for each year since 1984. In 1984 the typical new home cost 3.57 times the typical household’s annual income. In 2025 it cost 4.75 times. The ratio peaked at 5.81 in 2022. The Fed’s own survey uses a different yardstick, the values surveyed families report for the homes they own, and lands in the same place: the median home was worth more than 4.5 times median family income in 2025, up from a low of 3.5 in 2016.
Now the part the generational argument usually leaves out. Boomers who bought in the early 1980s paid brutal interest rates. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey hit 18.63 percent for a 30-year mortgage on October 9, 1981. GSR calculated the annual payment on a loan for 80 percent of the median new-home price at each year’s average rate. In 1984, that payment ate 40.2 percent of median household income. In 2025, it ate 29.1 percent. By that measure, the monthly squeeze was worse for the mid-1980s buyer than for a 2025 buyer.
That is a real point in the boomers’ favor, and it should be said plainly. But look at what happened after. Rates fell, with bumps, for four decades, from that 1981 peak to a low of 2.65 percent in January 2021. Falling rates make existing homes worth more, because buyers can borrow more against the same monthly payment. The buyer who paid 40 percent of income in 1984 could refinance as rates dropped and watch the house appreciate on the way down. A 2025 buyer pays a smaller share of income each month, but faces a bigger price relative to income, a bigger down payment, and rates that have gone back up rather than down. Freddie Mac put the 30-year average at 7.32 percent for the week ending October 22, 2026.
The down payment alone shows the change. A 20 percent down payment on the median new home was worth 0.71 years of median household income in 1984. In 2025 it was 0.95 years. That is three extra months of a typical family’s entire gross pay, saved while paying rent.
The price of the ladder
For most of the postwar era, the other half of the dream was college: the credential that turned a working-class child into a salaried adult. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked college tuition and fees in the Consumer Price Index since 1978. From the 1978 annual average to the 2025 annual average, that index rose almost 16-fold. Prices across the whole economy rose about 4.9-fold over the same period. In real terms, college tuition and fees cost about 3.2 times what they did in 1978.
One caution belongs next to that chart. A price index tracks what colleges charge across the market; what any one family paid after grants and discounts varies widely. The direction is not in doubt, though. By the same index, a freshman starting in 2008 faced a price, after inflation, nearly three times what a freshman faced in 1978. GSR’s earlier piece on student debt traced how federal bankruptcy law made those loans far harder to discharge than almost any other debt.
New Hampshire: older, pricier, and split by age
New Hampshire is one of the clearest places in the country to watch this play out, because the state has aged so fast. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey put New Hampshire’s median age at 43.6 in 2024, the third-oldest in the nation behind Maine at 44.9 and Vermont at 43.9. In 2010, the state’s median age was 41.3.
The household counts tell the story more sharply. In 2010, the survey counted about 79,800 New Hampshire households headed by someone under 35 and about 110,600 headed by someone 65 or older. In 2024, the under-35 count had grown to about 85,100. The 65-and-older count had grown to about 184,700. In 2024, for every young household in the state, there were more than two headed by someone of retirement age. In 2010, the ratio was about 1.4 to 1.
Prices moved faster than paychecks. The survey’s median home value in New Hampshire was $243,000 in 2010 and $458,800 in 2024, an increase of about 89 percent. Median household income went from $61,042 to $99,782, an increase of about 63 percent. Both are in current dollars as published. Divide one by the other and the median New Hampshire home went from about 3.98 years of median household income to about 4.60. The 2024 home-value estimate carries a margin of error of about $6,100, and the income estimate about $2,500, so the direction of the change is clear even allowing for survey noise.
Here is a number that cuts against the doom story, and it should be in the record. New Hampshire’s homeownership rate for households headed by someone under 35 rose from about 40.0 percent in 2010 to about 42.1 percent in 2024, by GSR’s calculation from the same Census table. The rate for households 65 and older moved from about 78.1 percent to about 79.6 percent. Young households that form in New Hampshire are, if anything, slightly more likely to own than they were in 2010.
The catch is in the word “form.” A young adult living in a parent’s spare room, or doubled up with roommates, or gone to another state, does not count as a young household at all. The under-35 household count grew by about 5,300 in fourteen years. The 65-and-older count grew by about 74,000. The state kept its young owners. What it failed to do was add young households at anything like the pace it added older ones. GSR’s July report on the state’s housing costs found a household needs to earn about $182,000 a year to buy the median single-family home in New Hampshire, citing New Hampshire Housing’s analysis.
The Chetty data puts New Hampshire right on the national path. The state’s estimate for children born in 1940 was 93.0 percent. For 1950, 78.5 percent. For 1960, 62.8 percent. For 1970, 61.5 percent. For 1980, 51.0 percent. Growing up in the Granite State did not exempt anyone from the slide.
New Hampshire’s neighbors land in the same place. The study’s estimate for children born in 1980 was 50.1 percent in Maine, 47.4 percent in Vermont, and 55.4 percent in Massachusetts. New Hampshire’s 51.0 percent sits in the middle of New England’s range, not at either edge.
Count the owners and the housing wealth comes into focus. Of the 184,717 New Hampshire households headed by someone 65 or older in 2024, about 147,100 owned their homes. Of the 85,068 headed by someone under 35, about 35,800 did. That is roughly four older owner households for every young one. When a state’s median home is worth $458,800, as the survey estimated for 2024, that ratio describes where the state’s household wealth sits.
Where “dead” goes too far
A GSR piece should be able to lose an argument to the evidence, so here is the case against the slogan, laid out at full strength.
First, half is not zero. The coin-flip cohorts still produced millions of children who out-earned their parents. A dream that pays off half the time is diminished, not dead.
Second, the other kind of mobility held steady. A 2014 study by Chetty and colleagues looked at relative mobility, which asks where a child lands in the income rankings compared with where the parents stood. For children born from 1971 to 1993, that measure was stable or slightly better. A child from the bottom fifth had about an 8.4 percent chance of reaching the top fifth in the 1971 cohort and about 9.0 percent in the 1986 cohort, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s summary. Where a child starts still predicts where that child lands about as strongly as it did. What changed is how fast the whole ladder rises.
Third, some of the measured decline reflects smaller families, as the household-size adjustment showed. Fourth, as calculated above, the monthly mortgage burden was heavier for mid-1980s buyers than for 2025 buyers. Fifth, the youngest families in the Fed’s survey still hold nearly twice their 2019 wealth in real terms, and in New Hampshire the young households that form are slightly more likely to own than in 2010.
Put all of that together and the verdict is still not close. The odds of out-earning your parents fell by roughly 40 points over four decades of births, and no measurement choice in the researchers’ published tables reverses that. The share of national wealth held by households under 40 nearly halved while the share held by households 70 and older rose by more than three-quarters. The 2025 federal survey shows the gap between the oldest and youngest families widening again. The accurate phrase for what happened is “rationed by birth year.”
Check your own number
You do not need a research team to run the Chetty test on your own family. Find your household’s income at about age 30 and your parents’ household income when they were about 30. Then put the older number into current dollars. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a free CPI Inflation Calculator that does the conversion with the standard consumer price index, the CPI-U. If your income at 30 beats your parents’ adjusted income at 30, you are on the winning side of the coin flip.
Two cautions. The study measured family income with spouses’ earnings combined, not individual pay, so a two-earner household at 30 should be compared with the parents’ combined income, not one parent’s salary. And the study adjusted for inflation with the CPI-U-RS, a research version of the index, so your answer may differ from theirs. In the study’s own sensitivity table, switching the 1980 cohort to the standard CPI-U moves its odds from 50.0 to 47.3 percent. That was the whole point of the sensitivity test above: the specific number moves with the method, but the gap between generations does not close.
What favored his generation
The Chetty team asked the question that matters most for anyone deciding what to do about this: what drove the decline? They ran counterfactual simulations. If the economy had grown faster since 1940 but split its gains the way it has, absolute mobility would still not return to the levels of the 1940s. If the economy had grown at its actual pace but spread its gains across income groups the way it did for the 1940 cohort, the simulations reverse more than 70 percent of the decline. Their conclusion is that reviving the dream requires growth that is “spread more broadly across the income distribution.”
That finding is the plainest answer to what favored Trump’s generation. The researchers’ simulations point to one factor above the others: an economy whose gains reached most families. Add the four decades of falling interest rates that followed, which lifted the value of every house and portfolio the early buyers already held. The oldest boomers caught both. The youngest boomers caught the second but less of the first. Gen X and the millennials paid college prices that climbed year after year in real terms, bought houses that cost more years of income, and, as of 2026, are watching rates rise instead of fall.
None of this makes an individual boomer a villain. A 1946 baby did not write the tax code, set mortgage rates, or decide what a semester at the state university would cost. But generations do write policy once they hold power, and this one has held it for a long time. Every president since 1993 except Joe Biden, born in 1942, has been a baby boomer: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both born in 1946; Barack Obama, born in 1961; and Donald Trump, born in 1946, who returned to office in January 2025. The decline in absolute mobility spans cohorts whose working lives ran through administrations of both parties. If the remedy is broader growth, the people in charge of delivering it are, mostly, the people who benefited from the last round of it.
The receipt
In 2015, Trump said the dream was dead and promised to bring it back bigger and better. Both halves of that sentence are testable, and neither has been tested yet in the way that counts. The Chetty measure for children born in the 1990s and 2000s will not exist until they turn 30 and their tax records come in. When it does, it will say whether any administration since 2015 changed the slope of that line.
What exists so far is the snapshot. In the second quarter of 2026, one generation held 52.5 percent of America’s household wealth. In 2025, the typical family headed by someone 75 or older held about 15 times the net worth of the typical family headed by someone under 35. In New Hampshire, retirement-age households outnumber young ones by more than two to one, and the median home costs about 4.6 years of median income.
The American dream did not die in 2015, and it did not die when Trump said it did. It was handed out by birth year, it was given most generously to the people born at the top of the curve, and it is still sitting, in the form of houses and portfolios, with the people who were born at the right time. Whether it gets passed on through broad growth or only through inheritance is a choice. The data says which one the last forty years made.
— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report
Your Turn
You tell me: Did you out-earn your parents at the same age, and what made the difference? Send your story, your town, and your birth year to granitestatereport@gmail.com. GSR will not publish names without permission.
Fact check
| # | Claim | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trump said “Sadly, the American dream is dead” in his June 16, 2015, campaign announcement at Trump Tower, and promised to bring it back. | VERIFIED | TIME, “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech” (transcript), June 16, 2015; C-SPAN full recording. |
| 2 | Trump came down an escalator at Trump Tower before the announcement. | ATTRIBUTED | Wikipedia, “Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign launch speech”; visible in C-SPAN recording. |
| 3 | Donald Trump was born in Queens, New York, on June 14, 1946. | VERIFIED | White House Historical Association biography. |
| 4 | Absolute mobility = share of children whose pre-tax family income at 30 (spouses combined), inflation-adjusted, exceeds parents’ at 30; cohorts 1940 to 1984; tax and Census data. | VERIFIED | Chetty, Grusky, Hell, Hendren, Manduca, Narang, “The Fading American Dream,” Science 356 (2017), paper and abstract. |
| 5 | Share out-earning parents: 1940, 91.5%; 1946, 85.8%; 1955, 69.6%; 1964, 56.5%; 1972, 60.8%; 1979, 54.3%; 1980, 50.0%; 1984, 50.3%. | VERIFIED | Opportunity Insights, Table 1 (national absolute mobility by cohort). |
| 6 | Cohort averages: 1940-45, 89%; 1946-64, 70%; 1965-80, about 58%; 1981-84, range 50.3% to 54.3%. | VERIFIED | GSR computation from Opportunity Insights Table 1. |
| 7 | New Hampshire: 1940, 93.0%; 1950, 78.5%; 1960, 62.8%; 1970, 61.5%; 1980, 51.0%. | VERIFIED | Opportunity Insights, Table 2 (state absolute mobility by cohort). |
| 8 | Table 4 holds 36 alternative estimates per cohort; across the 15 measurement variants, 1946 ranges 73% to 92% and 1980 (14 available) 47% to 71%; household-size adjustment 89% vs. 71%; in all 33 columns that report both cohorts, 1946 exceeds 1980 by at least 10 points; the paper reports a 26-point fall under the most conservative family-size adjustment and a median child-to-parent income ratio of about 3 (1940) falling to slightly under 1 (1984). | VERIFIED | GSR computation from Opportunity Insights Table 4; Chetty et al. (2017), Section IV and footnote on Figure S3. |
| 9 | Faster growth alone cannot restore 1940s mobility; the 1940 cohort’s distribution of growth would reverse more than 70% of the decline. | VERIFIED | Chetty et al. (2017), abstract and counterfactual section. |
| 10 | Relative mobility stable for children born 1971 to 1993; bottom-fifth to top-fifth odds about 8.4% (1971) and 9.0% (1986). | ATTRIBUTED | NBER Digest summary of Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, Turner, NBER Working Paper 19844 (2014). |
| 11 | Fed definitions: Silent and earlier, before 1946; Boomers, 1946-64; Gen X, 1965-80; Millennial, 1981 or later. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve Board, Distributional Financial Accounts, generation table notes (last update Sept. 18, 2026). |
| 12 | 2026:Q2 net worth shares: Boomers 52.5% ($97.4T); Gen X 25.7% ($47.7T); born 1981+ 11.2% ($20.8T); Silent and earlier 10.7%. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve DFA, generation shares and generation levels tables. |
| 13 | Boomers held 19.5% in 1989:Q3 and more than 50% every quarter since 2007:Q4. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve DFA, generation shares. |
| 14 | Under-40 households: 12.0% of net worth (1989:Q3) to 6.5% (2026:Q2); 70+: 18.9% to 33.6%. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve DFA, age shares table. |
| 15 | 2025 SCF released Oct. 9, 2026; median net worth $215,900 (+2%), mean $1.24 million (+7%), 2025 dollars. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve Board press release and report, “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2022 to 2025.” |
| 16 | Under-35 families: median net worth $33,000 (-23%), mean $135,400 (-33%), median income $67,800 (+2%); 75+: median $504,900 (+37%); decline tied to unwinding of 2019-22 business-equity gains. | VERIFIED | SCF 2025 report, tables 1 and 2 and net worth discussion. |
| 17 | 75+/under-35 median ratio about 15 in 2025, about 8.6 in 2022, about 18 in 2019. | VERIFIED | GSR computation from SCF 2025 report, table 2, and SCF 2022 report, table 2. |
| 18 | Under-35 median rose 143% from 2019 to 2022; 2025 level nearly twice 2019 in real terms. | VERIFIED | SCF 2022 report (“Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022”), table 2; GSR conversion to 2025 dollars using the two reports’ 2022 values. |
| 19 | Median home worth more than 4.5 times median family income in 2025; ratio bottomed at 3.5 in 2016. | VERIFIED | SCF 2025 report, Box 4. |
| 20 | Homeownership, 2026:Q2: under 35, 35.2%; 65+, 78.6%; under-35 annual average highest at 43.1% in 2004 within the series, which begins in 1994. | VERIFIED | U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Table 19; GSR annual averages. |
| 21 | First-time buyers 21% of purchases, a record low; median first-time buyer age 40; repeat buyers 62. | ATTRIBUTED | National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers highlights; HousingWire, Nov. 4, 2025. |
| 22 | Median new-home price / median household income: 3.57 (1984), 5.81 peak (2022), 4.75 (2025). | VERIFIED | GSR computation from FRED MSPUS (annual mean of quarters) and MEHOINUSA646N. |
| 23 | 30-year rate: 18.63% (Oct. 9, 1981, series high); 2.65% (Jan. 7, 2021, series low); 7.32% week ending Oct. 22, 2026. | VERIFIED | Freddie Mac PMMS via FRED MORTGAGE30US. |
| 24 | Payment on 80% loan: 40.2% of median income (1984), 29.1% (2025); 20% down = 0.71 years of income (1984), 0.95 (2025). | VERIFIED | GSR calculation, FRED data; 80% loan and 30-year term are GSR assumptions. |
| 25 | College tuition and fees CPI rose 15.9-fold, 1978 to 2025; all items 4.9-fold; real 3.2x; 2008 vs. 1978 real 2.9x. | VERIFIED | BLS CPI-U, CUUR0000SEEB01 and CUUR0000SA0, annual averages. |
| 26 | NH median age 43.6 (2024), third-oldest after Maine (44.9) and Vermont (43.9); 41.3 in 2010. | VERIFIED | Census ACS 1-year, B01002, 2024 and 2010. |
| 27 | NH households under 35: 79,811 (2010), 85,068 (2024); 65+: 110,552, 184,717; ownership under 35 40.0% to 42.1%; 65+ 78.1% to 79.6%. | VERIFIED | Census ACS 1-year, B25007, 2010 and 2024; GSR computation. |
| 28 | NH median home value $243,000 to $458,800 (MOE +/- $6,138); median household income $61,042 to $99,782 (MOE +/- $2,489); ratio 3.98 to 4.60. | VERIFIED | Census ACS 1-year, B25077 and B19013, 2010 and 2024. |
| 29 | A NH household needs about $182,000 a year to buy the median single-family home. | ATTRIBUTED | GSR, July 19, 2026, citing New Hampshire Housing, “Who Can Afford to Live in New Hampshire?” |
| 30 | Clinton and G.W. Bush born 1946; Obama 1961; Biden 1942; every president since 1993 except Biden a boomer; Trump returned to office January 2025. | VERIFIED | White House Historical Association (Clinton, Trump); Texas State Library and Archives (Bush); White House archives (Obama); UVA Miller Center (Biden). |
| 31 | 2026:Q2 born 1981+: 42.6% of household liabilities, 43.3% of mortgages, 46.3% of consumer credit; Boomers 20.8% of liabilities, 41.3% of real estate, 54.5% of equities, 57.2% of DB pensions. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve DFA, generation shares table, 2026:Q2 rows, and data definitions. |
| 32 | Under-35 DC/IRA participation rose from 42% (2016) to near 50% (2025); mean balance among holders $53,800 (2022) to $48,400 (2025). | VERIFIED | SCF 2025 report, Box 2 and Table A. |
| 33 | NH 65+ owner households about 147,100; under-35 owner households about 35,800. | VERIFIED | Census ACS 1-year 2024, B25007; GSR sums. |
| 34 | 1980 cohort: Maine 50.1%, Vermont 47.4%, Massachusetts 55.4%. | VERIFIED | Opportunity Insights, Table 2. |
| 35 | Chetty baseline uses CPI-U-RS; standard CPI-U gives 47.3% for the 1980 cohort. | VERIFIED | Chetty et al. (2017), data section; Opportunity Insights Table 4. |
| 36 | Under any plausible parent-child pairing, the 1940 cohort’s rate is 84% to 98%; 1946, 72% to 97%; 1984, 14% to 88%, with the 1984 pairing observed in tax records; the 1946 floor exceeds the baseline for every cohort born 1953 or later. | VERIFIED | Chetty et al. (2017), introduction and Section III; Opportunity Insights Table 4, lb_fosd and ub_fosd columns; GSR comparison against Table 1. |
| 37 | 20.0% of families held student loans in 2025, median $25,600; families with debt payments above 40% of income rose from 6.5% to 8.6%, the largest share since 2010. | VERIFIED | SCF 2025 report, Table 4 and debt-burden discussion. |
| 38 | SCF homeownership rate: 63.9% (1989), 69.1% peak (2004), 65.6% (2025). | VERIFIED | SCF 2025 report, housing discussion and footnote 21. |
| 39 | Levittown, Pa., built by Levitt and Sons on land bought in 1951 for postwar demand, especially veterans. | VERIFIED | Library of Congress catalog record, LC-DIG-highsm-56987. |
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Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the primary sources listed, and every GSR computation (generation averages, ratios, payment shares, sensitivity ranges, New Hampshire ownership rates) was rechecked against the source tables; see the fact-check table. The Chetty absolute-mobility series ends with children born in 1984. The Federal Reserve groups everyone born in 1981 or later as millennials in its quarterly accounts. Survey of Consumer Finances and American Community Survey figures are sample estimates. National Association of Realtors figures are the association’s own survey findings. Mortgage payment shares use median new-home prices and an 80 percent loan, a GSR assumption, not a measure of what any buyer paid. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors at the top of the article, states what changed and when, and keeps the correction permanently.
