Lots of inheritance paying out is the only logical explanation.
Because nothing got better, but your parents dying and leaving you half a house is a huge gain in wealth when you don’t have anything, leading to a huge percentage increase in wealth.
I’m not young, but that’s basically what we (sadly) are waiting for. My mother is well off and 82 and we have to wait for her to die to get our lives to a place where we’re all satisfied with them, i.e. selling the house we have now and moving somewhere else because we live in an undesirable location and our house is worth very little comparatively despite being a nice 3-bedroom in one of the safer neighborhoods in town.
She knows it too, which is the worst part. She already told me that she’s giving her giant house to me and not my brother so I can sell it and we can get out of where we’re living. God I hate that she has to think about things that way, but worse, my daughter has to think about things that way.
It’s bad enough that I do.
It’s still an improvement.
Sounds like it’s just you and a brother, a few generations ago 5-10 kids was normal, and a house didn’t mean much because it’s value wasn’t inflated.
Common people are actually able to inherit significant stuff now, which considering government inaction, is pretty much the only way to rebuild the American middle class.
It’s slow, and it sucks, but over time it leads to improvement.
Like say two families have two kids, and only one kid from each goes on to have kids, for simplicity we’ll say with each other. The grandkids are going to inherit from their grandparents, parents, and childless aunts/uncles eventually. That’s three houses, even if there’s nothing else
That’s wealth concentration, it’s how the upper class has been doing it for centuries.
Common white people are able to inherit it.
Generational wealth for people of color is still something many of them are not lucky enough to have.
I think you misunderstood.
I’m not talking about home ownership increasing, I’m talking about the amount of kids decreasing.
Like, say there’s a pizza, if it’s just you, that’s more pizza than you should eat. If you have to share it with 9 people, there’s not enough for anyone.
Because the price of homes drastically increased, and number of kids keeps declining, that means there’s more “pizza” and less people to share it with.
Even without homeownership, less kids still leads to a larger inheritance per child.
Maybe so, but that still mostly only applies to white people. A larger inheritance per child doesn’t matter if the inheritance is a paltry sum. Or no inheritance at all.
Do…
Do you think no poor white people exist?
Have you ever heard of West Virginia, or Kentucky?
That’s not even getting into poor white people living in cities.
Shit, look at the republican voter base, it’s mainly poor white people. Just because some have money, doesn’t mean it “trickles down” to other people for having the same amounts of melanin in their skin…
Are you really unaware of the generational wealth gap?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/eliminating-black-white-wealth-gap-generational-challenge/
Going from $1 to $2 is technically 100% growth but in reality it doesn’t mean much.
