What Changed In The Last 25 Years?

Every three years the Federal Reserve Board conducts a comprehensive survey on American household income and wealth. The latest edition of this Survey of Consumer Finances, with updates through 2013, appeared this past September.
Fed researchers do an official summary for each of these triennial surveys. But these summaries only skim the surface. Deeper insights on the Fed numbers have come from follow-up analyses by scholars like NYU economist Edward Wolff. They’ve dug deep into each SCF data dump and emerged with useful studies that go beyond the Fed’s initial summary.

These insightful analyses are now starting to emerge for the 2013 Fed data. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, for instance, has just chimed in with a brief paper that tracks household net work by age group — and wealth level — for the quarter century since 1989.

This new CEPR paper essentially compares how Americans in the same age and economic cohorts have fared over recent years.
Let’s say you now fall in the “older prime-aged worker” cohort, the age 45-54 group. How does the wealth of you and your fellow older primes compare with the wealth, inflation-adjusted, that older primes held back in 1989?
Not particularly well. In 2013, the middle class of this age 45-54 cohort averaged $57,400 in net worth, not counting personal residences, a total well below the $74,600 that middle class 45-to-54-year-olds averaged back in 1989.

Authors David Rosnick and Dean Baker run the numbers for every age group from 18-34 to 65-74. The new Fed data, they sum up, reveal an “economy where the bulk of the benefits are going to those at the top of the income distribution.”

from here