[throwawaygh]

> The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.

I dug into some demographics data and I'm almost certain this is false.

OP said millennials in their 30s. Life expectancy hasn't increased in the USA that much since the 70s. Even if the deaths were completely distributed among adults, you'd expect people in the 30s now and the 70s to have about the same number of parents alive/dead. More importantly, almost all of the increase is due to improved child mortality.

There's a much simpler explanation: Boomers were once-in-a-country's-history lucky. They inherited the spoils of two world wars.