Another quarter, another lot of growth figures higher than expected. Disobliging news, I know, for the Corbynistas, the 45 mob (still less than 55 per cent, by the way), leftie economists, the Twitter gang filling your timeline with charts proving “anti-austerity” candidates won a majority of votes (if you count Ukip as a party of the Left) at the General Election.

Against their assertions that the Coalition, and now the Tory Government, were wrong, all we have to show is yesterday’s announcement of the tenth quarter of successive growth, the most successful recovery of any developed nation, from – thanks to Gordon Brown’s profligacy and his banking bailout – a more indebted position than Greece.

Then there’s the average of 1,000 jobs created every day since 2010, more than in all of the Eurozone countries put together, with half of their average unemployment rate. In short, only the facts suggest that the reason the public gave the Conservatives an overall majority was that they got it mostly right.

Yet not everything in the garden is rosy. You will often hear caveats about these figures, occasionally from the Scottish Government whose current plans for Full Fiscal Autonomy include spending that would result in a Scottish deficit of £7.6 billion (rising through the course of this parliament) in addition to the existing Scottish share of the UK budget deficit.

But the fact the SNP were wrong about the need for austerity, wrong about where oil revenues would be, and that their plans would, on their own admission, result in greater austerity than the Westminster Government is planning, doesn’t mean there are no objections to be made to the recovery figures; only that none of their 56 MPs could make them with any credibility.

UK debt is still rising. So is public spending. You don’t have to be a raging Trotskyite to think that, if you plan to cut welfare spending, it might be an idea not to ring-fence provision for well-off pensioners, when the state pension alone accounts for 47 per cent of the total benefits bill.

Yesterday, it was reported that a new study for the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank which studies the “squeezed middle” of lower-income earners, had found a “promotion blockage” affecting the career-long earning ability of a generation of workers. It found that today’s 30-year-olds typically earn £2,800 less than those born five years earlier, and that the share of 18-29-year-olds in insecure employment had sharply increased, while headline figures on overall job security had remained more or less the same.

Part-time and temporary jobs and, above all, zero-hours contracts were cited as the likely culprits for what will no doubt be labelled a generational glass ceiling. This is predictable enough but interesting because the report doesn’t in fact quite say that.

For a start, they base their approach on the “seminal” study of Will Hutton from the 1990s, The State We’re In. His approach compares the “disadvantaged” (the unwaged and those on benefits); the “insecure”(those on low incomes or in part-time or temporary work); and the “privileged” (those in fairly well-paid, secure employment).

The good news is that the “disadvantaged” has fallen from 28 per cent to 23 per cent overall between 1994 and 2014; what’s more, it has fallen for every identifiable group. For almost all the groups, the number of the “privileged” has gone up, and the percentage identified as “insecure” remained about the same. The big exception is the 18-29-year-olds, where the percentage in secure jobs has fallen from 32 per cent to 26 per cent, and that for “insecure” has risen from 40 per cent to 50 per cent.

But when you look more closely, something interesting emerges; only about four per cent of workers in part-time jobs are unhappy with their conditions, and only about two per cent of those in temporary jobs are unsatisfied. More surprisingly, the percentage of workers on zero-hours contracts turns out to be about two per cent (it is hard to be exact, the report explains, because some categories overlap, and data was not available for zero-hours workers until recently).

A huge factor in the improvement of the “disadvantaged” group is due not only to the number of jobs created since 2010 and the reduction in benefits claims, but to the introduction of the minimum wage, which the Tories were so keen to oppose. George Osborne’s volte-face on this, and his brazen attempt to steal the Labour Party’s clothes by describing it as the "Living Wage” is a piece of pure political opportunism, and there are plenty on the libertarian and free-market wing of the party who still view it with suspicion.

There is, however, a kind of case for it as a Conservative measure, if not a laissez-faire one. If there is to be a minimum standard of income, it makes more sense for employers to pay it than for it to be funded by the taxpayer in the form of working credits: an effective subsidy to big businesses reluctant not only to pay proper wages but also reasonable taxes.

But it is a shift that has sharply affected pay and (though there are fewer zero-hours contracts than you may have thought) conditions, especially for younger workers. There are other factors that suggest that generation is getting "stiffed"; housing benefit, buy-to-let mortgages and insane property speculation make it almost impossible for the majority to buy a house. A larger ageing population, with its disproportionate welfare and health costs, cannot be indefinitely supported by a smaller working population, especially if it insists that the Ponzi scheme which is National Insurance means they have automatic “entitlements”.

That’s hard luck on a generation brought up to say “I’ve paid my stamps”, but it’s a good deal harder on the younger people expected to pay for them, but offered fewer of the same state provisions or employment opportunities. That’s why some of the less obvious factors in this “promotion logjam” may actually offer some hope.

One is that older workers are staying in work. This is bad news in the short-term for promotion, and, thus, overall earnings for younger people but it makes sense for pensions and benefits to be delayed, and working-age taxes maximised, when you have an ageing population.

Another factor in the lower wages of those under 30 is that they are much more likely to have had their earning capacity delayed by staying in education longer. That may be good news for a better educated and more productive workforce in future.

The last, but perhaps the most significant, change, which tends to put more people in the “insecure” bracket, may be the best news of all: many of them are self-employed. While the self-employed may run the risk of earning less, they have more influence over whether they can earn more. And the younger generation are very notably more entrepreneurial than those over 30; according to a recent report, 18 per cent of millennials started a business last year. That may be not just their salvation but it could also offer some hope for the rest of us, too.