Something feels off, and most of us have felt it for years without quite being able to name it. You work more hours than your parents did. You earn more dollars than they did at your age. And yet the math never quite adds up the way it did for them. The house, the pension, the two-week vacation, the single income that somehow covered all of it.
It doesn’t add up because, for the most part, it genuinely doesn’t.
Here is what the numbers show.
Affording a house
In 1973, the median home price in the United States was approximately $28,900. Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly $200,000 in today’s dollars. The actual median home price in 2024 is approximately $420,000, more than double what inflation alone would predict. Home prices have risen by around 1,045 percent since 1973, while wages have not kept pace. Your parents could buy a house on one salary. In most American cities today, two salaries and a decade of saving are often still not enough.
The paycheck
Worker productivity in the United States has grown roughly three times faster than wages since the 1970s. That gap, between what workers produce and what they take home, is the economic story of the last half-century in a single sentence. One 2021 study found that 84 percent of people born in 1950 had higher household incomes than their parents at the same age. That figure has declined steadily for every cohort since. In real purchasing power relative to housing, healthcare, and education, most people today are behind where their parents were at the same age. Your parents could expect each decade of work to bring a meaningful raise. Many workers today cannot.
The college degree
Baby Boomers paid an inflation-adjusted average of $3,519 for a year of public college tuition. The average in 2023 was $9,750, up 177 percent after accounting for inflation. Your parents’ generation could work a summer job and cover their tuition. The current generation enters the workforce carrying an average of $37,000 in student loan debt, a burden that delays homeownership, family formation, and retirement savings for years.
The retirement
Your parents most likely had a pension. A guaranteed monthly payment for life, based on years of service and funded by the employer. That model has been almost entirely replaced by the 401(k), which shifts all investment risk onto the employee. Fewer than 15 percent of private-sector workers today have access to a traditional pension. For your parents’ generation, it was the norm. They knew what was coming. Most workers today do not.
Bottom line
None of this is to say your parents had it easy. They had their own recessions, their own decades of high interest rates and stagflation. But the specific math of buying a house, funding an education, and planning for retirement has shifted in ways that are real, measurable, and worth naming. The deck was not stacked the same way. The numbers say so. And knowing that is a reasonable place to start.
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