The economy is going strong now though with historic lows in unemployment... for some people. That's the dilema we're currently facing. Those in the big cities in engineering, law, banking, medicine, and tech are doing very, very well right now, but those in the countryside face a very different reality. This has been ignored for a long time, and yet some people still don't understand how Trump was elected and denigrate anyone in the country as ignorant. If the tables were turned, I'm sure an equally ignorant reaction would result, however. That's the reality of human behavior.
It is doing better. I work for a trade school. You know the economy is bad when people are coming to enroll, and you know it's getting better when they aren't. Right now we're at our lowest numbers since the mid 00's. It's bittersweet, we'd be doing better if everybody else was doing worse.
The non-city folks are in a rough spot because a lot of their jobs are being automated or eliminated. Coal mines are dying, steel mills are all but dead, manufacturing was shipped overseas, farms are being micromanaged and automated. They get shit on for being unemployed bums, but what's left out there for unskilled workers? Not everybody is cut out to be techies, engineers, doctors, and bankers.
Gen Y and Millenials are synonymous terms, though. The latter is used almost exclusively to dump on us, though.
As if 9/11 wasn't bad enough, we also took the financial downturn in the late 00's on the chin--fresh debt from unprecedented college graduation rates, just as the jobs and markets disappeared. That's some bad luck there, but at least we didn't have to live through Vietnam and WW2 I guess--but they at least had favorable economies when they got home.