Quit looking backwards with green tinted glasses and consider how good you yourself have it right now. Take some goddamn responsibility for your own life decisions.
How? She was given secretarial work in the 70's and slowly clawed her way up while raising 3 kids, and was even lucky enough that her 7 years out of the work force in the early 90's when we were young didn't affect her career trajectory very much.
The possibility of this happening nowadays is slim to none. You need a degree to even be looked at for a lot of office work these days, and you can be sure you're not going to be promoted when they can bring in someone younger, with a degree relevant to their business sector, willing to work for less to fill any positions you could potentially be considered for. This also applies to lots of liberal arts majors as well as just high school students.
It also doesn't help that for as long as I can remember, my teachers, parents, and counselors have told me, my siblings, my friends, my classmates, and my generation that we should follow our passions and dreams, and success will follow. Luckily I like math, science, computers, and I've been a bit of a geek since I was a toddler, so I fell into my, coincidentally, highly-in-demand CS degree quite naturally. The same cannot be said of the bookish history, literature, or philosophy nerds I know.
There is blame all around, but from my perspective it seems like a lot more of it lay at the feet of our forebears than us.
But hey, at least us computer geeks have it good, eh?
What has changed is that pretty much everyone goes to college now, and many of them go for liberal arts degrees. You can't have 1000 people going for 1 job and expect them all to get it.
Unless it was Harvard, no, it didn't. People always joked that a liberal arts degree left you prepared to work in fast food and little else.
Why does no one tell the millenials then? If I wasn't already in tech before college, I would have no idea that it was a good career move (Computer Science is a very small department). Where do you get information to make a good decision?
It seems silly, but I feel compelled to remind today's youth that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Also, none of us know as much as we think we do.
And while lots of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas or whatever, automation has had at least as much impact. If you look at it in terms of production, U.S. manufacturing has grown over time. Even something like the steel industry is pretty much at par with the output of 40 years ago, they just do it with a lot fewer people.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 (fiddle the dates)
