Young people's wealth: the median triples, but capital itself doesn't budge

Selon Le Figaro, which presents the item as a "décryptage" that "bat en brèche une idée reçue" (our translation: a piece that challenges a received idea), a study by INSEE, the French national statistics institute, over fifteen years shows that the wealth gap between young people and their elders is narrowing. Under-30s would have almost tripled their median gross wealth, which the paper attributes to a change in behaviour. That is all we know: the wire report gives neither the amounts, nor the makeup of this wealth, nor the share coming from inheritances and gifts.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. First, a word on the adjective "brut" (gross). Gross wealth is assets without debt. A young person who borrows over twenty-five years to buy a flat sees their gross wealth jump while their net wealth stays close to zero, while the bank collects the interest. We would like to see both columns before talking about catch-up.

Next, the median. It tells you what the person in the middle owns, not who owns the buildings, the share portfolios and the companies. A median can triple while the top of the distribution soars even faster: the statistic reassures, but it does not answer the question that matters, that of capital concentration. Le Figaro speaks of "comportement" (behaviour), as if ownership were a matter of will and saving discipline. It is a neat bit of fetishism: a social relation is turned into a generational character trait.

For young people's wealth does not come only from wages. It depends on what the family can pass on or advance for the deposit. Two young people on the same income do not start from the same line. In other words, what is presented as a divide between ages probably overlaps with a class divide within each age group, one the wire report gives us no way to measure.

A wage, let us recall, covers only the cost of reproducing labour power; the surplus produced by unpaid work becomes profit. Whoever lives on a wage alone therefore accumulates slowly, and all the more slowly since housing, the biggest item of spending, enriches a landlord. For the young tenant, rent is a direct transfer into someone else's wealth. If under-30s who own are doing better, those who rent are partly financing that catch-up.

Finally, the precarity of young employment, that reserve pool of available labour which weighs on wages, makes buying without family support more uncertain still. Marx saw this as a constant mechanism: social wealth grows, and alongside it a mass of workers held in reserve whose situation remains fragile.

The good news, if it holds up, is real: some young people own more. But to say the gap is genuinely narrowing, one would need net wealth, its distribution by decile, and the share coming from transfers. Until INSEE publishes these in full, the median consoles more than it explains.