> I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist.
A short period of the modern era in which the US was pretty much the only nation with it's manufacturing capability completely intact after the destruction of WWII. The US also realized that funding education was important for a time after the war to retrain veterans. It's how so many people were able to get college degrees essentially for free which helped boost the economy for a generation.
> at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are
Since it sounds like you're limiting the modern era to after 2000, it seems we can stretch things a bit and look at the era of The Great Depression as being pre-modern by that definition (I think The Depression falls squarely in Modernity, but for the sake of argument...). Mortgage debt increased 8X from 1920 to 1929. Installment debt increased at similar rates. This is far from the first generation that's taken on a lot of debt.
Yes, I agree that there are forces at work which conspire to keep people in debt, however those forces are not new. Things are made worse by the high cost of housing which is caused by constrained supply (and a greater population now putting more demand on housing), but again, I'm not sure we haven't been here before. Pendulums swing. And why are houses so much bigger now than they were in that postwar era when families were larger? That also leads to higher housing costs (some of it is demand and some of it is perverse incentives for builders to build bigger houses).