Economist fact-checks Scott Galloway's anti-boomer TED Talk

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SOURCES:
I've linked my sources in the blog that goes along with this video. Links are in the text.

Timestamps:
0:00 - intro
1:59 - young people earn less
13:05 - life is more expensive
18:13 - transfers from young to old
20:26 - the young are unhappy
22:53 - discussion

Attribution:
Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.

Narrated and produced by Dr. Joeri Schasfoort

[Mary-Mar]

Elder millinial here. You're right that this issue is complex. I grew up in a poor family with a single mother with three children in a rural town. I made more money than my mother ever did within 5 years of graduating college, as my mother never made more than 25k a year, and didn't have a college education. My mother, however, was able to buy a house in a government subsidized neighborhood. I, unfortunately, needed to move to a more expensive city in order to make a decent income, and cannot afford a house within an hour travel time of where I work. So, on one hand, I'm doing better than my mother ever did, but on the other hand, I have had a hard time accumulating assets and building any kind of wealth.

[JustKeepingTrack]

My wage recently doubled. I cant describe how only spending 25% of wage on rent changes everything. Its insane.

[TheProfGShow]

Thanks for the good work, and thoughtful review. I learned from it.

[AB-zlnh]

My grandmother was an NHS (UK hospitals) cleaner and bought a 3 bed house in London on her salary. She paid off the mortgage in 10 years. It's now worth £600, 000 and she is technically a millionaire because she owns 2 homes.

What NHS Nurse let alone Cleaner today could own a 3 bed house in London?

[MoneyMacro]

Just to clarify, this video does not show that prof. G's message is false, or that the opposite is true. It merely critique's prof. G's evidence. My goal with these videos is to encourage better researched videos on YouTube and to show people what goes wrong in some videos and how they can be improved.

[moneypro]

Why would you compare earnings instead of buying power? Why would you ignore the time value of money when examining early life earnings?

[UvstudioCaToronto]

The fact that the younger generation has to stay in school longer is already an issue.
While Prof G's evidence might not be ironclad, the statistical direction of his observations is not really all that controversial.

[Dogo.R]

Its a bit sad that we still dont add "measured by xyz" or "defined as xyz" after every statement.
"wealth", defined how?
"inflation", measured how?
"worse off", measured how?
"economists recomend", economists defined how... which economists?

People just state things as if the definitions and measurement techniques are too annoying to say after every statement. Yet the statement is meaningless without them.
Most people dont even understand what an inflation % even means, or any of these other things. We just run around pretending like we are saying something even though we arent adding definitions or measurement technique after every statement.

[roberttaylor]

well, my grandfather had a lower class income, raised 2 kids and my gramma didn't work, but earned cash here and there with crafts, etc. They paid off their house in 10 years. No way to even think of doing that now where my daughter lives. The differences seem obvious but my life is not a scientific study!

[jean-michelnadeau]

An expensive house with a low interest rate is not the same as a cheap house with a high interest rate.

[TheFireGiver]

You mentioned it yourself. It's very difficult to accurately measure how young people are doing without looking at individual cases. If I don't pay rent because I live at home at 30 that doesn't mean I'm better off than my dad who moved out of the house at 18. He had to pay rent while I saved money. The experience of my life is worse than his though. Good luck measuring that sort of thing. Repeat that same thing over and over for every aspect of life.

[Studeb]

I think this video is trying to prove a point that I don't agree with, namely it is missing that the boomers were able to take advantage of the low interest rate of the last decade much better than the younger generations.
They already owned a house that those younger could never afford and by leveraging that many could take big loans to buy a second, third or fortieth home and corner the housing market even further. I also earn more than my parents, but I have come to the realization that not only will I never be able to live in a house as big as the one I grew up in, when we inherit mom's house, I will have to sell my half to some rich boomer who cornered the housing market, cause I can't afford to buy my sister's half.

[BrianGivensYtube]

You can measure “doing better” by a few metrics.

1. Earnings relative to cost of living.
2. Independence, ability to have kids and live on your own.
3. Happiness with career
4. Physical and mental Health
5. Financial mobility
6. Rate of poverty and homelessness
7. Suffering from all sources

[davideyers]

Boomer here. All these studies seem to always ignore Scale of Capital. As others in the comments have pointed out, high interest on a small mortgage is way less than low interest on a large mortgage. Combine this with the fact a house is now around 10 times the average wage as apposed to 3 or 4 times 40 years ago it is not hard to see why younger generations are seeing it as a tough gig. Sure they're probably earning more but you need two people at work to cover the costs which was not my young experience.

[tepobuo]

Idk I get that the charts can show different things, but the housing market alone is a huge slap in the face. A lot more of us live in precariously unmaintained rentals and our retirement is being drained into a landlord’s pocket

[ormondomaha]

I found your critique excellent until your last points. When you criticize Prof G's point about young people having less happiness and well-being, your counterexamples are "comparing apples with oranges." Better statistics on pollution, lead poisoning, and high school graduation are NOT as direct measures of "happiness" or psychological "well-being" as self-harm, depression, and overdose deaths are. Now Prof G is wrong to try to attribute these things to "generational wealth transfer", especially since as you point out his evidence for that is not very good., and for the most part his data showing declines in psychological well-being deal with even younger people than those in their early 20s that his supposed income and wealth statistics are about. The increase in self-harm and depression probably has completely different causes (one possibility being the way children and teenagers, especially girls, use modern social media), but they are certainly more indicative of "happiness" than pollution or high school graduation.

[basmca]

Younger generations beeing better educated doesn't do much other than raising the bar and cost of education for everyone.

You now simply need a higher education to get the same income you would before.

[horologix]

You keep on mentioning an increase in educational attainment as an increase in cohort QoL, but that's only relevant in as much as an increase in relative education levels within a cohort leads to better economic outcomes. Attaching a QoL increase to education itself is meaningless, one could easily argue it's a byproduct of higher requirements for navigating increasingly skill-segregated job markets.

[dantaylor]

The UK is the country where things have really tilted against the young. It has similar long-term trends to the Americans, but the added bonus of 14 years of governments voted in by and for the elderly. Since 2010, household income for working-age households has fallen, while household income for pensioners has risen - pensions are structurally guaranteed in the UK to exceed wage growth and inflation and are not means-tested, while benefits for the working-age disabled have been slashed and the most significant benefits are now means-tested. Taxes and education costs are massively up from 2010, the right for Brits to work anywhere in the EU is stripped as well, the consequences of the elderly-backed brexit fall on the young who voted against. Add the rising house prices and the costs of rent and mortgages, and that's another large transfer away from the young and towards the old.

But that's from 14 years of government policy, not a long historical trend. Think it's an interesting case study in terms of trust in the system too though, people sometimes talk about increasing anti-democratic views in young Brits... Until the election this year, the young were on the losing side of every national vote in the 13 years from at least 2011, and paid the price.

[MsFiyi]

Thanks for the video!

You mentioned that the younger generation is more educated on average, and the financial benfit of the higher education will more than offset the increased cost of living. But you haven't really shared evidence for this (please correct me if I'm wrong). I can't help but think the inverse is true.

Older generation could afford housing, education, and provide for their family all with "low-skilled" job wages, all while people with PhD degree nowagays struggling to make ends meet, let alone buy a house (depends hugely on geography as well as the sector). I have no evidence for this, only anecdotal. But this is the experience I have to share, as well as the experience of people around me (I have a MSc degree from Oxford and I am still struggling to survive, let alone buy a property). I know plenty of old people in their 60s and 70s with only a highschool degree, getting into banking and they comfortably own multiple houses now.

Edit: I would like to point out that I'm based in the UK, so things might be slightly different here than in the US, but I still do believe the overall point stands.