T alk of a “K-shaped economy” took off during the pandemic recovery. Economist Peter Atwater popularized the term in the spring of 2020 to describe an economy in which higher-income households and asset owners bounced back while lower-paid workers and struggling businesses fell further behind.

Six years later, Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research, sees another split, this one by age. Older people are richer than younger people. Of course they are. They’ve had more time to earn, save and buy things. What’s unusual now is how much the economy rewards having already done those things. Stocks are expensive, homes are expensive and the job market is getting tougher for people just entering it.

Yardeni calls it the “gen-shaped economy.” Baby boomers have amassed a record $85.4 trillion in net worth , about half of all household wealth. Some of that is just what happens when people get old. But not all of it. The typical boomer household had $432,200 in wealth in 2022, nearly 30% more than a same-aged Silent Generation household had in 2001, even after adjusting for inflation according to the Pew Research Center .

The nice thing about already owning expensive assets is that when those assets get more expensive, you get richer. Boomers can draw on that wealth and keep spending after the paychecks stop. Younger Americans are playing the game from the other direction. Find a job, pay the rent, save a down payment, then try to buy a home that now costs nearly five times the typical household’s annual income , up from about three times in the 1990s.

There’s no single explanation for how boomers ended up here. They will, correctly, point out that mortgage rates were brutal (peaking at 18.5% in 1981) when many of them bought their first homes. But those high rates also came with much lower home prices when measured against their incomes, and, though no one knew it at the time, marked the start of a nearly four-decade decline in interest rates. That gave homeowners repeated chances to refinance, lifted stock and home values and rewarded anyone who locked in the high yields then available on blue-chip bonds.

Boomers also had fewer children than their parents and came of age as two-income households became far more common. The share of married couples in which both spouses earned money climbed from 44% in 1967 to a peak of 60% in 1996 , before slipping back to about 53% by 2020. The Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped publishing the dual-earner series after 2020, but a related statistic that tracks whether both spouses are employed (not just earning money like the older series), currently sits at 49.1%, down from 52.5% in 2001.

Maybe all that mattered. Maybe only some of it did. What’s clear is where we ended up. These five stats show how different the economy now looks depending on your age.

52.8%: Workers Are Getting a Record-Low Share

Workers received 52.8% of nonfarm business output as pay in the second quarter, the lowest share since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1947. It was nearly 64% at the start of 2000. Real hourly compensation also fell 0.1% over the past year.

This isn’t technically an age statistic, but it helps explain the split. Younger Americans tend to have one big economic asset: their future paychecks. Older Americans had decades to accumulate homes, stocks and retirement savings on the back of a bigger workers’ share of what the country makes.

83% Vs. 63%: Older Folks Say They’re Doing Fine

Sometimes it’s worth just asking people.

The Federal Reserve did . Late last year, 83% percent of Americans 60 and older said they were doing okay financially or living comfortably. Among adults ages 18 to 29, it was 63%.

The gap is also getting bigger. Financial well-being among the younger group fell three percentage points from 2024, driven mostly by people ages 18 to 24. The figure for those 60 and older slipped one point.

Being young has never been known for its lucrative cash flow. Still, the Fed says the weakening job market for young adults may be making things worse.

47%: Mom and Dad Are Still Cutting Checks

Almost half of Americans ages 18 to 29 received financial help from someone outside their household last year. Among people 45 and older, just 13% did.

The help wasn’t all tuition checks or an occasional emergency loan. Young adults got money for cell phone bills, housing, car expenses and general living costs. (Perhaps it’s telling that this was a new question for the Federal Reserve’s yearly Economic Well-Being survey).

They needed it. Nearly one-quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds failed to pay all their bills in the prior month. Just 9% of people 60 and older did.

So yes, the economy is still producing jobs. It is also producing a lot of adult children on the family phone plan.

40: The New Age of a First-Time Homebuyer

The median age of first-time homebuyers hit a record high of 40 in 2025 according to the National Association of Realtors.

Meanwhile, first-time buyers accounted for just 21% of home purchases, the smallest share since NAR began tracking the figure in 1981. Of those first-time buyers, NAR reports, 22% got the down payment from a gift or loan from family or friends, suggesting that the K-shaped economy and the gen-shaped economy are interacting to accentuate wealth inequality and likely dissatisfaction with the economy among younger folks who don’t have parents wealthy enough (or generous enough) to help them break into the housing market.

There’s an obvious advantage to already owning the thing everyone else is trying to buy. Homeowners benefited as prices climbed. Would-be buyers got a bigger down payment to save for.

5.7%: College Grads Are Having a Rough Launch

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 5.7% in the second quarter, according to the New York Fed. For context, that number was just 3.9% at the end of 2019. What’s more, another 42% were underemployed, meaning they had jobs that typically don’t require a college degree. It gets worse. For most of the past three decades, recent college grads had a lower unemployment rate than workers overall. That advantage disappeared in 2019. In May of that year, unemployment was 3.8% for recent grads versus 3.7% for all workers. Today, the advantage goes to the general workforce which has an unemployment rate of 4.1%, 1.6 percentage points lower than new college graduates. Amid all of that, the cost of tuition is up 37.5% on an inflation adjusted basis since 1999. (What about skipping college? All young workers, age 22 to 27, including those without college degrees, had an unemployment rate of 7.2% in June, according to the New York Fed.)

This all translates into a rough start for Gen Zers and the youngest of the millennials (they’re turning 30 this year) still trying to build savings, move out, buy a home and start investing enough to catch up with their parents. So it’s probably no coincidence that young Americans have spent the past 15 years souring on capitalism. In 2010, fresh off the financial crisis and bank bailouts, about two-thirds of adults under 30 viewed capitalism positively. Today, according to Gallup, just 43% do, while roughly half have taken a shine to socialism.