[rubicon33]

I would have thought it was obvious what I meant by "deserve" but apparently I have to spell it out.

No, I don't mean that they are owed anything. This is life after all. You nor I, are owed a damn thing. And in a free market, that's explicitly true.

Duh.

What I mean by "deserve" is... prior generations with similar qualifications enjoyed a much smoother, and more lucrative career. Boomers were handed a golden egg, and managed to nearly destroy it. The middle class is shrinking, wages are stagnant, and frankly if you're not underemployed as a millennial you're among the lucky.

[tdfx]

I agree with your premise that baby boomers have very tenuous grasp on how unique and lucky they were to grow up in the economic time period that they did. When the vast majority of the world's population is third world farmers and your country is at the forefront of industry and technological progress it's easy to coast and succeed.

However, that's clearly no longer the case and the average American needs to compete with a much broader pool of labor, increasing automation, and a growing middle class in more populous, emerging countries. I don't think millennials "deserve" what the baby boomers had; I just think the baby boomers didn't particularly deserve it either and it's becoming more and more obvious that the "normal" they experienced is an outlier era that will not return. Millennials need to learn to compete in this world and on average they are not well equipped to do so because they learned their perspective from a particularly (and unusually) privileged generation.

[rubicon33]

I like your perspective on the situation. It's both accurate, and far less pessimistic than mine. I'll do my best to adopt this way of thinking going forward.

[dragonwriter]

> Boomers were handed a golden egg, and managed to nearly destroy it.

In point of fact, the policies which did that were adopted while the balance of political and economic power were in the hands of the Silent Generation, but it took a while for the effect to be fully felt and the Boomers were the last generation to have most of their working life before the wheels fell off.

[smudgymcscmudge]

The historical norm is living at subsistence levels. The last several generations have been an anomaly. We will return to mean. The millennials children will be worse off and the next generation even more so.

[rubicon33]

I'm not talking about the 1400s. The context of this discussion is not ancient history. It's the last couple of generations.