I feel like the point about wanting more or wanting what your parents had, but not being able to see the things that you have access to at better quality or for less is pretty huge. People like to do comparisons against other people and seem to be very materially driven, and lose sight of the more global or historical contexts that preceded them.
It's not just "better quality" or "for less". It's when. You can't compare the life you can afford in your 20s to the life your parents could afford in their 40s or 50s.
It's unfair for another reason. Your parents may have been just scraping by, but tried to hide the financial stress from their kids. When you're the parent, there's no hiding the financial stress from yourself.
But you absolutely can compare what your parents could afford in their 20s to what you could afford in your 20s.
And if you look at that, you'll realize that, correct, Americans are not as poor as they think they are - they are significantly poorer than that.
Think of the major purchases Americans made in their 20s, higher education, housing, etc. Compare the cost and quality with today. Now compare the income one needed then to survive and raise a family versus what one needs now. Compare minimum wage from that time to today. Compare the average income of a large company CEO vs their average worker between then and now.
You'll see that real wages have plummeted (and not kept pace with inflation), the C-Suite class has made a killing and not shared the wealth with their workers, inflation has skyrocketed, cost of living has grown to an unsustainable level, and things such as education have become so unaffordable that people are skipping out on it altogether.
I would counter the house/education one by suggesting that it's cherry picking the points that support the underlying claim. It seems like other tech related items that people engage with everyday without even thinking about it are orders of magnitude less expensive. Ex: communication, information access (especially global). But even this is missing the underlying contextual claim, and your arguments kind of highlight exactly that. Americans primarily are looking at there immediate history (one generation back) or at what others have around them. They don't typically compare against other cultures or 100+ years ago.
Real wages absolutely plummeted over time for Americans but taken in the context of non-americans is another point that was trying to be brought up.
