I'm not so sure your data supports your conclusion. On homeownership, you argue more are moving to cities - but that supporting article doesn't address ownership, it just says "moved to." Not "purchased property." The first article pretty much disproves your point - young adults are delaying home purchasing, and only catch up 5 years later. Which is consistent: young people can't afford the same thing until much later. The homeownership rate is inconclusive as well. It pretty much supports the huge drop in owners living in their property the last decade. This DESPITE extremely low interest rates. The 80s it makes sense because of high interest rates - in a period of low interest rates, homeownership should have exploded. it didn't.

Now as interest rates rise and houses are still overpriced, the difficulties will multiply.

> People also have a major bias from due to social mobility. For people who's parents owned a house and they don't, it seems like everything is falling out of reach. They don't have the perspective of the equal number of people who are in the opposite situation, where they are homeowners and their parents weren't.

Social mobility is key - but social mobility has significantly slowed down. There is a stark divide with millennials - the college educated have done just about the same as boomers, but the non-college educated have done worse.

> For example, you can look back just 10-20 years and see significant progress in civil rights, homicide rates, and social services. Medicaid didn't even exist before 65' and has undergone a number of large expansions since. It is easy to forget little things like 2+ million boomers were forcibly drafted to go fight in a foreign war.

You can go back and forth with qualitative comparisons. Boomers didn't have a global pandemic or a recession that matched 2008. Inflation now is matching the 80s, so that argument goes out. Iraq and Afghanistan exist, and the largest attack on US soil was committed. Oh, the cold war? Yea Russia is still threatening nuclear war and we have the largest war in Europe since World War 2.

In any case, the numbers that matter prove the point: generations are not doing better than their predecessors for the first time in a long time. Millennials are slower to homeownership, slower to marriage, have to get more educated to compete, etc. These are all quantitative.

The pissing contest doesn't matter much if people are storming the capitol. People are unhappy, for good reason. Telling them they're just alarmist is just sticking your head in the sand. There's a reason fascist politics are back and socialism is gaining ground - people are struggling, more of them are, and more are becoming desperate.