“It requires a little fortune, now, to buy a house, and every article of furniture costs about three times as much as it did ten years ago.” That complaint isn’t from a TikTok video or a Substack newsletter — it’s a line in a piece titled “The Men Won’t Propose,” published in 1866 in a health magazine called Hall’s Journal of Health, more than a century before anyone had coined the term “Gen Z.”
The quote opens a new report from the BCG Center for Macroeconomics, “The Kids Are Alright: The Timeless Angst Over Young People and Money.” Economists Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Paul Swartz, and Henry Rubin argue that the received wisdom about a failing, falling-behind generation doesn’t survive contact with the data: Gen Z, by their reckoning, is richer at the same age than Millennials, Gen X, or the Baby Boomers ever were.
