History repeats itself. Each generation tends to think that the circumstances affecting them are unique to it. Looking at the comforts that the Baby Boomers enjoy today, it's easy to forget what the Boomers had faced back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
This New York Magazine article ("Downward Mobility") written back in 1982 could have essentially been written today about the current Millennial generation entering the workforce:
http://nymag.com/...
Here are excerpts from the article:
Worse, the cost of housing has soared... has made it impossible for most in the baby-boom generation to afford the houses they grew up in.
"The baby boom generation may never achieve the relative economic success of the generations immediately preceding it or following it."
There are, quite simply, too many people in the same cohort. An M.A., M.D., or M.B.A. means so much less now because there are so many more of them. In almost every occupation, the competition is up and the rate of promotion down for the baby-boom generation.
More excerpts from the 1982 article:
With more people born between 1946 and 1957, for instance, than there had been in the previous 30 years, there is more competition for everything from a house on the beach to a place in medical school.
Sounding like a latter-day Malthus, Easterlin has linked a whole series of disturbances that afflict this generation to its size: marital strain, high rates of divorce, suicides, anxiety, and higher rates of white-collar crime. "They feel greater economic pressures, and a lot of consequences flow from that," he says. By contrast, their parents had it easy. A low birthrate in the twenties and thirties kept the population down and the competition low.
Also, middle-class people in 1982 get to keep a smaller percentage of their money than did people in the fifties. Taxes exact the largest bite. A married couple living in Manhattan whose combined income was $66,000 in 1981 paid about 40 percent of it in taxes, according to Harvey Grosberg, of the Research Institute of America. A married couple earning an equivalent amount in 1962 (roughly $22,000 in '62 dollars) paid only 27 percent of their income in taxes (assuming only the husband worked, which was most often the case). This is called bracket creep. "Basically, tax rates haven't kept pace with inflation," says Martin Karlin, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Manhattan office. An earned income of $50,000 put a person in the top (50 percent) tax bracket in 1972 and 1982, even though in 1982 that $50,000 was really only worth $21,561 in 1972 dollars.
Of all the taxes, the one that has had the steepest rise is Social Security, and that's been a double blow to young couples in the 1980s. With husband and wife likely to be working, both have to shoulder the increase.
The decline in public services and amenities accounts for another new expense the young affluent have to bear. The same municipal services that middle-class people routinely took advantage of in the fifties have steadily deteriorated: mass transit, parks, schools. "My mother sent us to public schools, wheeled our strollers in the park, and took us to Neponsit [a city beach]," says Marsha Rose. "I wouldn't send my kids to those places now."
Maybe our country will get through this period of ennui just like the Boomers did. Who are we to think we're the first generation to have encountered economic and social difficulties?
A lot of the pessimism I have read on this board seem to lack such perspective, and instead prefer to blame on whatever target is most convenient or politically advantageous.