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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Except the vast majority of them own property that they originally purchased for under $50k which, if sold, would net them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Many of them are on pensions (something that doesn't even exist anymore), plus they receive social security payments.

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Maybe in high-COL areas, but a lot of the older people in the US also tend to live in areas that young people have mostly left, like rural areas or small towns.

Owning a house for 30 years in Berkeley in 2021 is a lot different than owning a house for 30 years in Gary, IN.

Houses in rural areas still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the added benefit of a lower cost of living.

Maybe one or two. I just dropped a pin in Tecumseh, OK and there are several houses for sale <100K. https://zillow.com/tecumseh-ok/?searchQueryState=%7B"paginat...

This is only true if they have been able to live in the same place for 10+ years. There aren't that many places or fields where one can keep working without interruption without a significant move. And each house transaction starts the growth clock over.

If you’re going to make those assertions, bring data. Certainly some have done well, but the assertion that most of the boomers have done well or even disproportionately well relative to other generations should be supported by data not handwaving

It's not like boomers in the '70s and early '80s had $50k just lying around. Even today that is considered a sizable amount of $. Wages were pretty low back then even when adjusted for inflation. Saving $50k would have been a major challenge even for professionals back in the 80s. It's easy to see how cheap things were generations ago and think that this meant things were thus more affordable, but not necessarily so.

Fwiw, starting salary for a chemistry PhD in industry was somewhere in the 30-40k usd range in the early 80’s. There was a downturn during that time that made looking for anything but a postdoc difficult.

Edit: unless it’s changed recently, the ACS publishes their salary survey for chemists in the us yearly so you can look it up if you seek data on pharma salaries.

You make an interesting point, and I wonder if hearing about the very high incomes supposedly being earned by employees at certain tech companies explains the willingness for young people to incur large amounts of student loan debt.

No, but the previous generation was able to buy their houses for $15k and the boomers went and inherited all of that.

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