I was born to Taiwanese American immigrants in upstate New York in the 1970s. My father worked at General Electric, my mother at BlueCross BlueShield. Like many others, the America I thought I inherited from them was one of opportunity. Work hard at a job or school, get into a trade or college, and start a family in a home you could afford. Work for a few decades, then retire.
The boomers have lived in a world largely like that: 90 percent of them ended up better off than their parents, and they assumed their children would do the same. The suburbs would continue to thrive, the number of cars per household would go up, and more frequent and exotic vacations for their children would be just one of the payoffs for that lifetime of hard work to provide their children with opportunity.