Business Insider's Linette Lopez reported on some disappointing data from the Washington, DC-based think tank Young Invincibles.
Among white Americans ages 25 to 34, median income decreased 21% between 1989 and 2013 — though it increased among Latinos, who started at a disadvantage.
What's more, as Steven Rattner described in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, millennials also have a lower net worth ($10,400 in 2013) than Gen X had ($18,200 in 1995).
Perhaps the most startling finding comes from a 2017 paper by social scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and University of California, Berkeley: Economic mobility has decreased significantly since the 1940s.
Specifically, about 90% of Americans born in the 1940s outearned their parents by the time they hit 30. That figure drops to 50% among Americans born in the 1980s. The authors attribute the change largely to growing income inequality.