Are they “entitled whiners,” as one of my readers emailed me? Some of them, sure. But as I argue at Bloomberg Opinion, their discontent with the economy is rooted in real experience.

The combination of a decline in the rate of growth during booms and the severe 2007 recession has meant that millennials have spent many years in an economy that did not deliver the gains their elders had experienced. Median family income in 2014, again adjusting for the PCE deflator, was slightly lower than it had been in 2000. There was no other long stretch of decline since the statistic started to be collected in 1953.