There are so many deep flaws with this article that it is difficult to believe it was written by a seasoned economics professor. I can only conclude that he's pushing some sort of agenda or is otherwise politically motivated.

1. The complaints he is mocking ("can't afford a $1,000 repair", "can't afford eggs") are about liquidity and cash flow. He rebuts them with accumulated net worth. Home equity or 401k can't pay for groceries though. Someone can both have decent net worth and have trouble affording basic necessities or paying for emergencies.

2. Households aren't people. The SCF's unit is the family, and the age is set by the reference person. The author says stuff like "Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s" describes households that usually contain two adults. Per person, divide that number by two and it becomes a lot less impressive. It also mangles the young end, e.g. a 25-year-old living with their parents aren't their own household.

3. A cross-section isn't a life cycle. He reads a 2022 snapshot as a trajectory ("age a couple decades and you're rarely poor"). But today's 65-69s are special: they caught a four-decade bond bull market, an equity boom, and a housing boom on top of that. Add survivorship: poorer, sicker people die earlier and drop out of the older bins, which mechanically inflates old-age wealth.

4. He concedes half of median wealth is home equity, then waves it away. But if you strip primary residence, the overall SCF median falls from about $192,900 to roughly $57,900. Reverse mortgages ("negative mortgages") have steep fees, low loan-to-value in your 60s, and tiny take-up... and you still have to live somewhere.

Aside from all that, he is also using the data wrong. He had ChatGPT build the table from the raw SCF. I am actually quite familiar with that file. It requires survey weights and five imputation implicates handled correctly. Percentiles in five-year age groups from ~4,600 families carry error bars that are pretty wide! Not to mention 2022 was a peak: median net worth had jumped 37% from 2019, which was the largest on record, and it happened mostly due to house prices skyrocketing. That, in turn, skewed the numbers.