k wrote:

Oh, it's so hard to be young these days! Just crack open Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time To Be Young, by Anya Kamenetz, or Strapped: Why America's 20-and-30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut, and you're plunged into a world of darkness and sorrow.

This is, with apologies to the Broadway musical Avenue Q, the "It Sucks To Be Me" Generation. To hear these authors tell it, college graduates (and twentysomethings who haven't gone to college) are in a world of hurt. The deck is stacked against them: student loans and credit-card debt, budget deficits and McJobs, high housing prices and generational warfare waged by more-numerous baby-boomers.

I remember in college one savvy professor who told us biz students born in the last year of the Baby Boom how screwed we were. He outlined clearly the huge bulk of boomers that would be well entrenched in management positions by the time we were even applying, and that they would continue to dominate all the highly paid occupations until we were well into middle age.

You know, the internet and huge economic change turned everything on its head. Those early boomers wound up being laid off in droves as corporations downsized and eliminated generous retirement plans. The job world is no longer what it once was - get a job with a solid company and put in 20 years to a cushy retirement in a paid for suburban house.

Today's graduates have an amazing flexibility of skills and expectations and I think that they too will craft a world of material sufficiency and emotional welbeing; one that doesn't look like their parents or grandparents.

That is, unless "the Invisible Hand has taken historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would call prosperity."