I think boomers had it easier economically. For example one person (usually the man) could support a whole family with one pay check back in the days (including owning a home, sending kids to college etc). That can very rarely be done nowadays.
Also unions are mostly a thing of the past - so you have a whole new class of people who have very precarious existence, going from one temp job to the next (I recommend watching Guy Standing's talk 'The Precariat'). Many of our parents worked for the same company from their 20s to retirement - how many of us will be able to do that? Hell - how many of us will even work in the same profession from 20s to retirement?
I think if you gave the generations born from 1914 through the late sixties / early seventies the choice between the existential threats they lived through in that period and the perceived economic hardship younger generations suffer today, they would pick economic hardship every single time.
Most western countries have also had a huge rise in living standards during the same time period meaning that the conception of 'economic hardship' is very different today to the post-war depression.
Sorry I see my comment was misleading , I meant baby boomers (born after 45+). I think a lot of millennials feel like their parents are better off than they will be.
Gotcha! Thanks for the replies. A really interesting area and very hard to quantify overall either way. I find that usually when people frame it in the terms I did, most people (not you because you seem very considerate already!) think about the post-war pre-70s generations in more kindhearted terms.
