Dean Baker: The Scary Truth About Seniors and Money

March 3, 2013  |  I realize that Pew is a very prestigious outfit, but Pew's garbage is still garbage. It's report on wealth by age group, or at least the interpretation that it and others have given this report, fits the bill.

A couple of years ago, Pew did an analysis [2] that gave breakdowns of wealth by age group. It found that the median household over the age of 65 had $170,500 in net worth. I was actually pleased that they came up with this number, since it meant that theprojections that I had done more than two years earlier [3] with my colleague David Rosnick were almost right on the nose. It's always gratifying to see other researchers independently corroborate your findings.

But what was remarkable about this report was that the Pew researchers took this number as evidence of the affluence of the elderly. The study points out that this was a 42 percent real increase from the 1984 level. By contrast, households under age 35 saw their median net worth fall by 68 percent to just $3,700. This disparity in wealth by age continues to be the take away from this report in the media [4].