I have another report about the Netherlands…
Somewhere it is often said that today’s younger generation is the first one that will be worse off than their parents. And maybe in some European countries this is the truth.
Dutch data, however, paint a somewhat different picture about Dutch situation.
A new analysis by the Dutch national statistics office, CBS, compared different generations at the same ages.
First of all, Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) is the Dutch national statistics office and one of the most important institutions for understanding how Dutch society is actually developing. CBS was established as early as 1899, and its task is to collect, analyse, and publish reliable and independent statistical data about Dutch society and the economy.
The CBS results are fairly clear: at the same age, younger generations generally have greater purchasing power and more wealth than the generations before them.
For example, at the age of 45, the generation born between 1970 and 1985 had purchasing power almost half again as high as that of the baby boomers at the same age. Overall average purchasing power among the population also increased from €26.3 thousand in 1977 to €45.3 thousand in 2024, measured in 2024 prices.
A similar development can be seen in wealth. The median wealth of the Dutch population in 2024 was almost five times higher than in 1993. Rising property prices played a particularly important role in this.
This does not mean that young people in the Netherlands have everything easier. Up to around the age of 25–30, the youngest generations often have less money and wealth, partly because they spend longer in education. And housing in particular has become very problematic: the generation born between 1970 and 1985 has the highest rate of home ownership among the post-war generations studied.
Nevertheless, the main conclusion is this: the Netherlands is not a country where every new generation automatically falls into a worse economic situation than the one before it. On the contrary, when comparing people at the same age, the long-term trend is generally the opposite.
And that is precisely one of the reasons why the Dutch model is so interesting. It is not only about how much money people have today, but whether a society can continue to improve its standard of living over the long term, across generations.
In a way, I perhaps can now tell the truth that this may be connected with a “porcelain eyes” that I sometimes see looking at me, or that I see them exclusively in the Benelux countries, as well I saw this among someone’s from France. This itself say a lot to me about Western Europe.
