My take on it is this. As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done

My take on it is this. As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done by teams of people (it's what my grandpa did) but now can be mostly done by machines. Houses can be mass produced by a handful of orgs. And of course the US also used to do much more manufacturing before it was mostly outsourced. So we became a service economy. Except we automated the heck out of services too. Bookkeeping types of jobs have been mostly replaced by software tools. Likewise the kinds of jobs that connect people to other people like phone operators or marketing/advertising agencies have either been made obsolete or so efficient that a handful of companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) can basically meet the needs of the entire nation. Nearly every industry has been disrupted now by tech, which means we've increased efficiency & reduced jobs in all those fields On top of all of this, we have had great success in bringing women and minorities into the workforce. The economic prosperity we had post-WW2 was primarily not shared with African Americans, so the vision of getting a good job and buying a house while young was not a possibility for that group. Probably the best time for economic opportunity for minorities in the US is right now. Most of the above is good. And I wouldn't even label what we have as "bad Boomer policies" so much as just outdated ones. We are sooo slow to adopt any sort of policy changes whatsoever. The free market is good at solving lots of problems, but it is utterly incapable of solving problems related to distribution of wealth, because companies only have the power to direct wealth inward (if the company were, on average, directing wealth outward it would very quickly go bankrupt and cease to exist). As for academia, a lot of low hanging fruit has been had across multiple disciplines, so testing new theories has become exponenially more expensive. Cutting edge research 100 years ago would have cost $10k to set up a bunch of mirrors to measure the speed of light. Now it costs in the $billions to measure the presense of certain kinds of matter. So the return value of scientific funding has gone down... so scientific funding has gone down. Despite this, the state of the job market in the US is not very appealing so more people than ever are pursuing / staying in academia. I have no idea what the fix is but I think a basic income policy would help