If you want to understand why boomer accusations of millenial "entitlement" are so enraging, take a look at this chart. (if it was just a matter of investments rising in value over time, then the Silent gen would be wealthier than Boomers; but they're not)

Gross generalization alert, but: people are biased towards the belief that they deserve what they have. Boomers present their own freakish generational luck as the result of individual striving and hard work because it avoids psychically painful status-costing self-recognition.

This "méconaissance" (misrecognition) preserves an egoic defense against feeling devalued. People want to be able to like themselves and the feeling that one has earned what one has is, for many, crucial to sustaining that feeling But . . .

A great deal has to be disavowed in order to suppress the knowledge that one is really a beneficiary of something general, systemic and impersonal. Somebody built the platform on which you stand; but it's more soothing to think that you got there all by yourself.

Again, obvious point, but: this can also be cashed out in relation to average white household wealth. Slavery has a causal relationship to the capacity of individual white households to pass down wealth, to grow investments, to give children assistance with a down payment, etc.

But the recognition that one is a beneficiary of the enslavement of others, and that one's capacity to own property is rooted in other people having been property, eats away at the project of white middle class self-regard. Hence the hostility to the #1619Project from the right.

So the real "entitlement" issue is that some people feel entitled to admire their own life narrative as an upward climb of personal striving, dignified labor, and agency. Attention to structural inequality, generational cohort benefits etc. eats away at that. The truth hurts.

This plays out in electoral politics too. Politicians who let Americans love themselves tend to defeat voices that call for reckoning & self-scrutiny. It's not strategic to acknowledge the depressive realist position that this country was founded in genocide & exploitation.

This can also be cashed out in my own context, academia. People want to believe that they hold their current positions because of their own hard work- but all current faculty are the recipients of (relatively) better labor markets that made their success and positions possible.

In my own case, I was hired in 2006. Sure, I "worked hard," but I would have to be a fool not to notice that I was also the beneficiary of a cohort-wide lucky break, relative to the bleak present. For evidence of this, take a look at this chart of the available jobs in my field:

Whoah this kinda blew up- thanks to those responding and pointing out that we need better data that factors mortality in, breaks it down by population percentage, also by race and gender because generational cohorts aren’t monoliths- all very true. But still . . .

I disagree with the assumption that in time millennials will acquire similar wealth; obvious factors: wage stagnation, rising costs, rising student debt, impact of recession, institutional austerity leading to the end of pensions, rise of gig economy- they all factor in here; +