It has become almost axiomatic to say that the Baby Boomers won the economic lottery. They bought houses decades ago that are now worth many multiples of what they paid. They invested in markets that rose far beyond what anyone in 1980 could have reasonably forecast. A house bought for $100,000 that is now worth $1.2 million. A stock market that has turned early investments into forty- or fifty-baggers. These facts are real, and denying them only weakens the argument that follows.
But facts are not the same as conclusions. And what has quietly hardened into orthodoxy is not simply that Boomers did well, but that no subsequent generation can possibly do as well.
That belief now functions as an article of faith.
Inheritors, not creators
The so-called Greatest Generation did even better, in relative terms, but their success is framed differently. They are seen as deserving: they survived the Great Depression, fought and won a world war, and then presided over decades of expansion. Their gains are moralized as reward. The Baby Boomers, by contrast, are often framed as accidental beneficiaries — they won no wars, suffered no Depression, yet captured extraordinary asset appreciation. Their gains are treated as luck, not legacy.
There is truth in this distinction. Boomers did not create the post-war settlement; they inherited it. They also lived through a historically unusual period of monetary expansion, falling interest rates, and asset inflation that magnified returns to capital in ways few anticipated at the time. In 1979 or 1980, almost no one predicted the Dow would reach 49,000, or that the TSX would grow many times over. Those outcomes look inevitable only in hindsight. No one thinks that the Dow Jones will reach 2.4 million in 40 years… or do they?
The unproven assumption
But here is the subtle point that often goes unexamined: the critique of Boomers now rests on a second, unproven assumption — that such expansions are not merely unlikely to recur, but essentially impossible.
We now speak as if it is settled that houses bought today will not be worth ten or twelve times more in forty years. That equity markets will not compound in ways that turn today’s investments into life-altering wealth. That the extraordinary gains of the late twentieth century were a one-time anomaly, never to be repeated.
Perhaps that is right. But it is not knowledge. It is conjecture.
The orthodoxy that younger generations cannot do as well fuels much of the contemporary case for intergenerational redress. If the prize can no longer be won, then fairness demands redistribution. If the ladder has been pulled up, then it must be rebuilt — or at least partially dismantled at the top. That logic is coherent, but it depends entirely on accepting the premise that the future is structurally closed.
What’s history got to say?
History offers little comfort for such certainty.
In 1980, interest rates were in the high teens, inflation was rampant, productivity was weak, and confidence in institutions was low. Few would have described that moment as the dawn of an unprecedented forty-year bull market. Yet that is precisely what followed.
Today’s young adults are living through a different configuration of risks — climate change, technological disruption, geopolitical instability — but they are also entering an economy shaped by forces whose full effects are not yet visible: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, energy transition, and demographic change.
None of this guarantees equivalent wealth creation. But neither does it preclude it.
Pessimism as a fact rather than a hypothesis
There is another mistake embedded in the current narrative: the reduction of “doing well” to housing prices and stock indices alone. The Boomers’ prosperity is measured almost exclusively in asset values. Yet future generations may accrue advantage in other currencies: longer healthy lives, different forms of security, more flexible work, or technologies that dramatically lower the cost of essentials. These gains may not show up as twelve-fold house price increases, but they may matter just as much.
The danger of the current orthodoxy is not that it criticizes the Boomers — much of that criticism is earned. It is that it treats pessimism about the future as settled fact rather than contested hypothesis. Once that happens, policy debates become less about expanding opportunity and more about reallocating presumed scarcity.
The Boomers did win the prize. That much is clear. What is less clear — and far less discussed — is whether we know enough to declare that the game is over.
History suggests caution. Faith, whether optimistic or pessimistic, is not analysis. And when an entire politics of intergenerational justice rests on the conviction that things cannot be better, it is worth asking whether that conviction reflects reality — or merely the limits of our imagination.