Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

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