The post war boom needed people, was a time of great building. That had created past a peak, and we no longer were able to exploit foreign labor markets and resources with quite such abundance by Gen X's day.
But today? We had a fantastic economy. Life was expensive as hell, but at least there were economic prospects, things to do, careers that felt worth doing.
But now, we are chainsawing apart the economy. Political speech-control is forcing companies and universities to behave certain ways, to eliminaye jobs and career paths. Healthcare, sciences, and international diplomacy are being gutted, dismantled entirely. With foreign students to afraid to risk the arbitrary injustice of ICE and potentially being sent to a prison states super prison, universities will lose one of their reliable revenue streams. These are going to massively impact jobs.
This story is a good one to remember, about a change, but the horros happening now are utterly self inflicted, by people aggressively dismantling the New Deal and the post-wsr American Way of Life, eliminating enormous amounts of jobs & the career paths that started these jobs.