One of the worst disservices you can do to a person is to tell them it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get ahead.
I do not agree with your assessment of the easier time because of expansion being unique to that time period. There have been expansions in varying sectors many times in history. The trick is to use your natural gifts, luck, hard work and oportunity to find & mine the possibilities of your time.
The boomer whiners would be more believable if there weren’t so many fortunes being made in recent years, just as in the past. History is replete with those successes. One of the marvelous things about America is that classes aren’t fixed. People move up & down, often several times in one life.
I was thinking specifically of tenure-track jobs at universities, and particularly in History. Maybe it was different in other professions. I saw some old publications from the American Historical Society from the 1960s and there was an incredible number of positions being advertised. One of my professors who finished about 1965 had something like 16 job offers. Even though he was at a flagship university he liked to grumble that he should have gotten a better job.