“An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.” So says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whose visibility as a spokeswoman for this generation has been boosted by political friend and foe.

Of course, Ocasio-Cortez misspoke. It’s ridiculous to say that someone who grew up in and worked in metropolitan New York City “never saw American prosperity.” Those high-rise buildings didn’t appear through spontaneous generation. Somebody put up the money to build them.

What Ocasio-Cortez surely meant was that Americans born about 1989 and coming of age about 2007, the year she graduated from Yorktown High School in suburban Westchester County, haven’t seen much economic growth in their professional lifetimes.

In 2007, the year the Great Recession hit, layoffs skyrocketed and job openings plummeted. College graduates faced bleaker prospects than their counterparts a few years before, and jobs for young, non-college males seemed to disappear.

Economic growth remained sluggish throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. And the spike in economic growth since Trump took office and his tax cuts passed has been most robust among lower-skill workers, and not so much for college graduates such as Ocasio-Cortez. Yet that suggests Ocasio-Cortez is complaining about a national move toward less economic inequality, an argument you’re not likely to hear from a Democrat, at least not out loud.

But perhaps Ocasio-Cortez is taking a longer perspective. A recent Federal Reserve report, using standard inflation indexes, says her fellow millennials are doing worse than Generation Xers or baby boomers. One common refrain is that blue-collar wages reached a peak way back in 1973 and have never recovered since. As economist Tyler Cowen points out, the use of inflation indexes intended to measure short-term fluctuations can be misleading when extended to longer, multidecade periods. As it happens, 1973 was a year followed by almost a decade of the highest inflation since the years just after World War II. Applying standard inflation indexes over the next several years made “real dollar” earnings seem misleadingly low.

The problem is that any inflation index, based on the cost of a market basket of goods, tends to overestimate inflation over time. One reason is that people respond to higher prices of the measured goods by substituting with cheaper products — buying chicken or pork rather than beef, for example, when beef prices spike.

Government statisticians in the 1970s assumed that people refinanced their mortgages every year, thus spiking housing costs. But when interest rates spiked, people unsurprisingly stopped buying houses and taking out mortgages.

The other reason that inflation indexes overstate inflation, and therefore understate wage increases, is that they have great difficulty measuring quality improvements and the value of innovation. In 1970, I bought one of the first electronic pocket calculators for $110. It would cost maybe $3 today. Or perhaps we should say instead that it's almost free, an even less expensive part of the cost of my cell phone. Statistically, the cost of calculators would tend to imply almost infinite inflation in that period, which is of course absurd. Now imagine the same absurdity over an even longer stretch of time.

Now imagine the same absurdity over an even longer stretch of time. What is today’s equivalent of the price paid to build Blenheim Palace? Queen Anne gave £250,000 to the Duke of Marlborough to build it after his victory over France in 1704. Considering the great technological advances in construction machinery during the time since, and the changes in labor costs based on the number of workers required and the value of their wages, it would be hard to put an exact value on it beyond saying that it's a huge amount of money.

These weaknesses in the calculation of long-term inflation are nobody’s fault. The federal government’s admirable statistical agencies, justifiably proud of their long-earned reputation for integrity and absence of political influence, try to account for product improvements, but they’re reluctant to constantly fiddle with the components of market baskets or product quality for the very good reason that such changes might become, or might be thought to become, targets of political manipulation.

Those of us who were alive and kicking in 1973 would not choose to go back to its technological levels or standards of living. We’re not ready to give up smartphones or ubiquitous air conditioning or the inexpensive fresh fruits and vegetables on supermarket shelves today, or the pharmaceutical advances that expand our lifespans by a dozen years.

Ocasio-Cortez, like most people busy leading their lives, tends to take these things for granted. The history that today's young have been taught — a narrative of unending American misdeeds and injustices — overlooks that until about 1800, as Jonah Goldberg shows in his recent book Suicide of the West, sustained economic growth had basically never happened. Even those willing to go back and live in 1973 conditions would be appalled by the limitations that Queen Anne and the Duke of Marlborough took for granted.

So keep things in perspective. The past decade’s economy has been far from perfect, but America has seen prosperity the likes of which our ancestors could never have imagined.