These cross-sectional comparisons are really difficult. For example, the author mentions rent in Boston. The homicide rate in Boston in 1990 was three times higher than today, comparable to where Newark is today. There were good jobs downtown, but the tech boom hadn't yet begun. In 1990, the city was coming off of three straight decades of population decline. Since 1990, the population has grown 20%, but the city has built almost no new housing: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iY_crGvqlCv....

The author also talks about working in "word processing." That was a much rarer and more valuable skill in 1990 than today. I'm a child of the 1980s and early 1990s, and despite coming from an upper middle class family, I didn't learn how to touch type until 8th grade. My daughter has a Macbook pro and is on pace to be a touch type by the end of second grade.

I'm not saying there is "nothing to see here." But we can't have a serious conversation about this unless we have a serious conversation about this. Part of having a serious conversation is agreeing on the facts: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/11/young-adult.... The fact is that millennial households make more money today than previous generations did at the same age. Households headed by people ages 22-37, adjusted for changes in household size, make 60% more money adjusted for inflation than in 1967.

Another thing is acknowledging that, if you compared housing in cities to other positional goods, Medford or Astoria or Mountain View are a different product today than they were in 1990. It's like how the Camry and Accord keep moving up market and new models are slotted underneath. The equivalent of Medford back then is some suburb in Kansas City.

Third, we have to acknowledge that credentials such as college degrees are not as valuable today as in the past: https://www.the74million.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Pell.... In 1970, 40% young people coming from the top quarter of households (by income) had a college degree by age 24. Today, that's 58%. In the next quartile down, that figure nearly tripled, from 15% to 41%. And in the next quartile down (people from families making below the median income) that number doubled from 11% to 20%. Being a college degree holder just doesn't mean as much today as it did 50 years ago.

Fourth, we have to acknowledge changing demographics. We have to acknowledge that economic immigrants tend to come into the country with little in the way of financial resources. And even a country that's doing a great job of providing inter-generational mobility for those immigrants will show more poverty in aggregate statistics than one that doesn't have any economic immigrants. That's true in the U.S. as well. Data shows that all major immigrant-heavy ethnic groups, including Hispanics, have incomes that are converging with those of the white majority over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353#20151.... But the percentage of the population that's a first generation immigrant--and thus disproportionately likely to have come here with limited means and education--has tripled since 1970.

It's easy to take a couple of data points from two time periods and draw conclusions. But such analyzes assume everything else is staying the same, and the conclusions aren't worth very much unless you account for changes. Doing that accounting properly is very hard.