Edit: Another example is health insurance is tied to your employer in the US. It costs anywhere from $400 per child per month to $1k per month per adult, with a $17k out of pocket annual maximum. Imagine you've scraped together some savings for a house or a business or kids' education, and a wage earner becomes ill or injured, and can't work. Now you have giant expenses coming your way at your most vulnerable, and government help from Medicaid (for subpar quality healthcare) doesn't kick in until after you've exhausted all your assets, so you are at risk of getting sent back to square 1.
I know that people from the 50s to the 80s didn't have internet, healthcare technology, medicines, smartphones, etc like today. But obviously there is something to be said for the stability or utility of knowing that your children will most likely have a better future than you did, and the demise of this fact (or belief) is causing friction in society.
Depends on how you qualify "better". By the listed measures, this is still the case. By available land/population this is clearly not. Do we have any reason to believe our children will not have better healthcare, nutrition, access to information, etc than we do?
If we don't, then what justification is there for agitation?
What measures? The ones in your original comment?
>healthcare, education, sanitation, nutrition, shelter, comfort, convenience, etc.
In the US, you can trace all of these back to wages, especially since healthcare is tied to your employer in the US, and you can look up any a variety of data to show that wages stagnated decades ago, length of tenure at employers decreased, increased participation in "gig" economy and service industry which don't offer benefits (i.e. loss in wages), consolidation of growing economies in fewer areas of US resulting in cost of land rising disproportionally to income, etc.
> Do we have any reason to believe our children will not have better healthcare, nutrition, access to information, etc than we do?
I don't know who "we" is here, but it's reality for people who spent 20 to 30 years at a manufacturing facility that was then outsourced and who now live in a town with no significant business, whose kids' only hope is to use college to boost themselves into an in demand career, but that involves moving to a HCOL area where they now have to sink a significant amount of money into their land purchase (house) to establish themselves, away from the rest of their family.
>If we don't, then what justification is there for agitation?
I don't know what other sources of information you want, but I know pretty much everyone in my parents' generation got married, had kids, raised families, and now the number of people that are coupled up is around half in my family and friends, and those with kids by mid 30s is even lower, maybe a third.
There's shortages of healthcare providers in rural areas because no one wants to live there, there's more and more competition for in demand areas as everyone tries to get in before they can't afford it.
This is all volatility. This didn't happen when everywhere was growing, but this happens when you have a divergence, and you're either on the upswing or the downswing.
This seems to disregard the trememdous advances in all the fields of healthcare made in the last 40 years. Treatments are readily available for diseases which were previously death sentences. Treatments that were prohibitively expensive in 1980 are cheaply available today. Once we factor this into our analysis I don't think anything has stagnated.
> whose kids' only hope is to use college to boost themselves into an in demand career
What about trade school? There's a shortage of construction labour and skilled trades throught the country.
> have to sink a significant amount of money into their land purchase (house) to establish themselves, away from the rest of their family
I don't recally anyone being forced to buy houses. Plenty of folks raise families in apartments. I myself was raised in one. Yes when you live in a metropolis you can't afford as much space. And?
> and now the number of people that are coupled up is around half in my family and friends, and those with kids by mid 30s is even lower, maybe a third.
And how much of this would you attribute to people making different choices and having different priorities? How would you control for people's willingness to be poorer and still have children?
Do you think this feeling is reflected in actual risk though? If so, how would you quantify it? If not, shouldn't we expect/teach people not to feel so volatile and be more grateful and content?