The modern problem, perhaps, is that now we have new forms of gambling (crypto! day trading! spread betting apps!) which are perhaps not as obvious, are not as visible in society, and fall outside of existing regulations?
And how could it not erode? It's difficult to take pride in your hard-earned cash when it's all coming from a stack of advertising media fueled by advertising media, as if all the way down.
Pareto distribution is the norm, marked by brief transitional periods during which the people at the top of the pareto distribution change. These transition periods correlate strongly with wide-scale disasters such as war or plague.
Wealth inequality is an important factor but expecting everything to boil down to one simple factor is overly simplistic.
I assume wealth inequality is worse today than Ancient Egypt, but regardless of how it is, this point is key.
Tell that to the sweatshop worker who made your jeans.
Or to those poor restaurant owners who now have to pay a 30% fee to the likes of Uber eats to maintain a steady income.
(If it's up to Apple, developers are next!)
Some poor industrial age miner with no better case scenario than becoming a respected poor miner would have been far more resilient (and surely many fell victim to similar schemes nonetheless)
Trading is only different from gambling in that we don't view the belief in "skill" as a sign of addiction and instead feed into it with the mainstream news cycle. There's no practical difference between betting on stocks and betting on horse racing except the levels of complexity permitted.
The trick to winning at stock gambling is that unlike with regular gambling if you have enough money, you can effectively "be the bank". The more money you, the easier it becomes to diversify your investments and in some cases you can effectively bet on black and red at the same time and still turn a profit.
It's less about skill and more about having the wealth to feed complex financial vehicles that practically guarantee an ROI over time.
> Tell that to the sweatshop worker who made your jeans.
The sweatshop worker doesn't believe their skill at their job translates into wealth. The sweatshop worker knows they're in a deadend job barely making enough to feed their family and that they'll be cycled out if they get sick, injured or simply have a few bad days.
They might still believe their "skill" at gambling could make them money. But they probably don't have enough money to be able to "invest" in trading.
(although if you're going to the Tudor era, maybe consider the legal restrictions on conspicuous consumption: https://bluffkinghal.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/sumptuary-laws... )
Maybe this topic doesn't interest you.
They would never have an endless Instagram feed of fashion model people with jetset lifestyles, building on decades of TV shows like "Lifestyles of the rich and famous" or "Keeping up with the Kardashians". Consider how much you have heard about a Hollywood star or Jeff Bezos compared with how much you have heard of Hugh Grosvenor, the world's richest person under 30. Before TV, before newspapers, before most people could read, you'd never have heard of either of them.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Grosvenor,_7th_Duke_of_We... )
So by that rough estimate wealth inequality between top and average seems about the same back then compared to now. Jeff Bezos might be worth more than half a million man years, but not 10 times more. Also the Pharaohs owned more than the Pyramids so the estimate underestimates their wealth.
Could you blame them for thinking that anyone who works for a living is a mug, paying for the lifestyle of kleptocratic boomers? Cryptocurrencies provide an emancipatory (and entirely false) narrative. Why not gamble, and try to defeat the system?
The biggest thing robbing people of generational wealth is Social Security that takes 7% of your earnings for your entire life and when you die you have nothing to give to your children.
One of the largest contributors to wage stagnation is immigration policy. Previously a path to higher wages was higher education. Except those Universities (and big business partners) bring in immigrants to perform their high skilled labor and call them "graduate students" to crush middle class wage growth.
Another path to wage growth was previously to start your own small business. Try having a discussion with a group of 20-somethings that with very little money they could buy a pressure washer or other relatively inexpensive equipment and start a small business making $40/hr+. You'll be barraged with responses about how it's crazy because not every person in the country can get a job doing the thing I happened to give an example of, or how starting a business is really hard, or insurance, or licensing requirements in the state that they support.
You're absolutely right that the Boomers have fucked their kids and grandkids. But those grandkids, already in a hole, are shoveling down as fast as they can.