Business in America has always been a cutthroat affair, but in the 1970s the corporate mentality swung right wing. Behemoth corporations demanded tax cuts and immunity from regulations, all to compete with companies from emerging markets as modern globalization waddled through its infancy. President Jimmy Carter obliged first and presidents have obliged ever since. The result, French economist Thomas Piketty tells us, is massive concentration of wealth amongst the world's largest corporations and the people who lead and own them.

Last year, novelist Michael Hingston tweeted, "'Millenials are lazy,' declares generation that could spend an entire decade hitchhiking on acid and still buy a house before age 30." Old people responded angrily that he had misspelled Millennials.

As ever, they miss the point. He's joking, but he's not that far off. If the American Millennial were lazy—with the rigged-at-the-top competitive landscape that they've inherited—the wheels would have entirely fallen off the engine that is the American economy by now.

The Baby Boomers, just coming up in the 70s, didn't notice the changing American economic landscape. Their children, Generation X and the Millennials, were going to have a much tougher time as wealth concentrated at the top—and any claim that "a single person's riches take nothing from the average citizen" can't change that.

Rich people spend money on rich people things and because they can bid higher and higher for what they want, they can cause concentrated inflation. Nobody cares much when the rich bid up prices of fine art collectibles, rare sports cars or even charity board seats. But the rich also bid up prices on houses, education and health care, often putting them out of reach of people with more Earthly means.

The size of houses is up 18 percent. Home ownership is down four percentage points in the last four years.

Since 1970, corporate health care plans have become stingier, passing larger bills onto insured workers even as health care costs have risen faster than inflation in the rest of the economy. After Obamacare was implemented, medical outlays (what families actually pay) dropped for the first time since 1970 but still climbed faster than inflation. Because of this, people have to borrow to pay medical bills and such debts are a major cause of personal bankruptcy.

And healthcare costs—and quality of care—are unequivocally higher and worse than they were 25 years ago. We spend nine times as much on healthcare as we did in 1980—and almost twice as much as almost any other developed nation.

High home prices caused our most recent financial crisis as homebuyers could not afford to live the American dream without debt. Much scorn was heaped on the borrowers. In constant dollars, median home prices nearly doubled between 1970 and 2000 and then doubled again between 2000 and the 2007 peak. Prices have subsided but not in job rich urban areas, leaving cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami with huge, unaddressed affordable housing problems.

You can pick up a cheap place in Detroit, though. That's a city where half the residents can't find enough work to pay their water bills, and the UN is now set to intervene.

Then there's education. It's not just the elite private institutions where prices have climbed out of reach. The cost of even public school higher education in 1970—not the $45,000-per-year private institutions, like Harvard or NYU—is in a different league entirely than it was decades ago.

In 1970, the cost of a public university education cost, on average, 4 percent of a family's income. By 2010, it cost 11 percent. Lower corporate taxes and lower taxes on the wealthy make for stingy state budgets, and that means bigger bills for students who pay through borrowings that cannot be discharged by a bankruptcy court. Again, this is the cheapest possible higher education option—in an economy where higher education is becoming less optional for jobs that offer a living wage.

This creates graduates who, when faced with massive bills upon graduation, become immediately pliable workers ready to take whatever employers offer in order to avert financial catastrophe. Lower cost workers mean bigger corporate profits and bigger pay-offs for the people at the top.

This is not the hardest time to be a young American, but it's not an easy time to get ahead. Given that the economy has grown from $4.7 trillion in 1970 to $16 trillion now, it's harder than it needs to be—and it's even harder for today's young workers than it was for their parents.

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