For whatever value of "young person" I am in my mid 20s: Climate change is going on and will have some unfortunate consequences, but the world is not ending and there's hope for advances in carbon capture etc. Civilization will march on and find a way. The state and federal government, for all the ways they've failed in protecting my rights, let me bootstrap my career with student aid, being the first of my family to…
While "no" social mobility is a bit extreme, social mobility has drastically reduced in america. Here is a pretty famous paper showing so: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19843 Personal responsibility can only take you so far if getting hold or keeping hold of such opportunities are hard in the first place
I did notice it says some areas have high mobility still:
> The U.S. is better described as a collection of societies, some of which are “lands of opportunity” with high rates of mobility across generations, and others in which few children escape poverty.
I see in some charts online that social mobility has allegedly declined steadily since the boomer generation, but of course they're a special case directly following the great depression into an unprecedented economic expansion.
Social mobility can't go upwards in real terms forever - if your grandparents were poor, your parents were middle class factory workers, and now you're an office worker - does your child really need to be a doctor or a ceo? So I think the better question might be, is our current level of social mobility acceptable, and did it go down because people are ok just staying in a relatively decent spot (not becoming a lawyer and just being an office worker like your dad) or because opportunity has actually gone down.