Millennials living in the UK are the first generation since the 1950s to fail to do better than their parents, as this chart shows:

Resolution Foundation

The chart comes from the Resolution Foundation, which does research into economics and inequality. It dovetails with a previous estimate by the Bank of England that people under age 45 are 10% poorer today than they were in 2007.

Millennials have been robbed of the ability to do better than their parents because of a couple of key decisions taken by their parents' generation. Those decisions were:

To keep interest rates near zero after the great financial crisis of 2008.

To abolish defined benefit pension plans in favour of defined contribution plans.

Most millennials have no clue how those two changes have hurt them. After all, macroeconomic policy doesn't come up very much on Snapchat or Instagram. The following charts go some way to explaining the extent of the damage.

They also show that over the same period, older people — their parents' generation — have grabbed £2.7 trillion ($3.4 trillion) in newly created wealth for themselves.

The mortgage market has been a disaster for millennials

Home ownership rates for millennials are now so low they're at levels not seen since World War I:

Resolution Foundation

Millennials are largely priced out of the UK property market. This is what has happened to property prices since the 2008 crisis, according to the Office for National Statistics:

The average price of a house has gone up by nearly £70,000 ($87,000) in the last 12 years.

Over the same period, wages stagnated:

Put those two things together — rising house prices and stagnant wages — and the result is that the time it takes the average person to save a deposit for a house has increased from three years to 20 years, since 1998:

That hurts millennials the most because, being young, they have the fewest number of cash-saving years behind them.

Housing price increases have mostly been fueled by low interest rates, set by the Bank of England. The BoE decided to set those rates to juice the economy with cheap money after the 2008 crisis:

Bank of England via EconomicsHelp.org

The BoE's rate-setting body, the monetary policy committee, does not have any millennials on it. Its members are all older than age 45.

Their decision — which made taking out a mortgage very cheap — was hugely damaging for millennials. Anyone who had enough cash for a deposit suddenly had no reason to rent. Interest rates are so low you're basically being punished if you pay rent rather than pay a mortgage, which earns you equity over time.

Naturally, buyers rushed to get mortgages. The increase in buyers drove prices up, causing a sharp division between those with enough cash to fund a mortgage deposit (older people) and those without (millennials). The millennials thus ended up as renters, not owners.

After 10 years of low interest fuelling this trend, Britain is now essentially divided into two classes: property owners and people who are getting poorer because they pay rent, the foundation's data show.

At the same time, millennials were robbed of their pensions

At the same time, employers took advantage of a little-noticed change in the law from 1986. It let companies change the pension plans they gave their employees. Most companies have now axed their old "defined benefit" plans in favour of much less generous "defined contribution" plans. Business Insider calculated that this removes about £36 billion annually from Millennials' employee compensation, based on data from retirement consultancy Lane Clark & Peacock and the Pensions Policy Institute.

This chart from the Resolution Foundation shows that older workers' defined benefit plans were the equivalent of 21% of their annual income. Millennials' defined contribution pensions are only worth 5% of their income:

Resolution Foundation

The Resolution Foundation says that this represents almost a direct transfer of wealth from Millennials to older people: The older pension plans — which failed to grow to meet their commitments precisely because interest rates have been so low — required companies shovel more money at them. If interest rates were higher, that money could have gone into Millennial pensions or salaries:

"As a consequence, many firms now have to set aside large sums of money from today’s revenues to fund yesterday’s promises. According to the Intergenerational Foundation, this runs to as much as £35 billion per year."

"Importantly, a substantial amount of this money will form the retirement income of past workers and those already in retirement. In other words, billions of pounds each year is being extracted from the productivity (and therefore the potential earnings pots) of today’s workers to pay the retirement incomes of yesterday’s."

Note how similar the number cited by RF — £35 billion annually — is to Business Insider's calculation of the aggregate pension wealth being stripped from Millennials annually. The two numbers describe different variables but they both give you an idea of the scale of the annual redirection of wealth away from millennials.

So, what has been the combined cost of these two factors, low interest and pension cuts?

£2.7 trillion that millennials will never see

Last year, the Bank of England calculated an answer. In a speech given by monetary policy committee member Andy Haldane (age 49), he said the UK has generated a total of £2.7 trillion in new wealth since 2007, of which none — zero — in aggregate went to Millennials. Haldane published this chart showing the data:

Bank of England

All of the aggregate wealth, net, went to people over 44.

Millennials got up to 10% poorer.

Haldane said:

"All of the £2.7 trillion rise in wealth since 2007 has been harvested by those over the age of 45, two thirds by those over the age of 65. By contrast, those aged 16-34 have seen their wealth decline by around 10% over the period."

The situation is particularly harsh for Millennials because low-interest rates exacerbated the damage being done to pensions.

Interest rates and pension plans aren't acts of god or forces of nature. They are policies that human beings choose. There were plenty of alternatives: The Bank of England could have pursued higher rates or made fewer rate cuts. The government could have mandated haircuts for defined benefit pensions or more aggressive "superannuation" for defined contribution plans. Westminster could have mandated fiscal policy easing (government spending or tax cuts) instead of relying on monetary policy easing (interest rate cuts).

But those alternatives were not taken. Instead, virtually the entire economic cost of the post-crisis period was laid off onto Millennials.