Whether or not you want it, and defining it arbitrarily as having a spouse, 2.5 kids, owning your own house, and a job that allows you to save for retirement. Undoubtedly things look significantly dimmer for most of us than they did our parents. Back then, an entire year of college was payable with what you'd earn from a summer job, and you didn't need a degree to get a summer job (slight exaggeration). Pensions existed outside of the government and banking industries, Unions for labor-intensive jobs existed, and labor-intensive jobs existed. Factories still used human and/or domestic labor, and outsourcing was not synonymous with importing. Nowadays, it seems like most people without degrees are lucky to get jobs in the service industry. For a lot of the unskilled workers, you're lucky just to be able to pay your bills with a single job. College has a low ROI for a lot of the people attending it, and with many of the "real" unemployment rates (those that don't stop counting people after they've been out of the workforce for long enough) nearing 1/5th of the population, it seems reasonable to assume it's negative for a lot of them too. I know a lot of these are over-generalizations, and I'm not saying anything about what caused this, but it's definitely a different landscape than what they told us it was going to be in school. I guess I'm bringing this up because, while I'm in a relatively good position (nearing graduation with an Engineering degree), I still see people from last year's class that are unemployed. This lead me to read into some info about how the "lack of scientists and engineers crisis" is manufactured, and that they just promote STEM degrees so there are more engineers in the workforce so companies can pay them less. I haven't really had time to evaluate the validity of it yet, but it seems legitimate enough to consider it. I guess I'm just having trouble seeing how the people burned by all this will be able to turn it around, even if everything was fixed tomorrow.