We've grown up entitled. All that will fix that is for our kids to face real hardship. So, either we fix scarcity and end up with an Iain M Banks style of post-scarcity Culture in which the idea of "entitlement" is itself obsolete, or we all starve in the squalid wake of Peak Oil.

But mostly I'll try to blame credit and MTV. Credit (which has driven Western capitalism since the mid 1700s) for offering easy loot; and MTV for blinging up everyone's aspirations.