I’m a big fan of Louis Menand, but I disagree with a bunch of things in his recent article, “It’s time to stop talking about ‘generations.’” Menand pushes back against simplistic stereotypes, and of course he’s right that there’s no sudden sudden difference between people born in 1964 and people born in 1965, but I disagree with statements such as “there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations” and “the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.”
What Menand is missing is that differences in generations are not supposed to represent inherent differences between people; rather, they represent different social circumstances in which people grow up.
The baby boomers were the biggest generation ever. They grew up in an era of large families, expanding schools, and a society in which they were the largest group of people. That really is different from the experiences of the generations that came before and after. Other key differences are economic conditions (seemingly permanent growth and stability), political (inequality of nonwhites and women), global (cold war and fear of world war 3), and of course cultural (sex, drugs, and rock and roll). For later generations, economic growth sputtered, political inequality decreased, but the cold war stayed for awhile longer, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll aren’t going anywhere. Anyway, my point is that, yes, any particular boundary is arbitrary, but there are good reasons to say that the baby boom generation grew up in a way that was different from what came before and after, in particular ways that were much talked about at the time.
I respect Menand’s point that there’s more variation within a generation than between a generation. For example, in our article on generations of presidential voting, Yair, Jonathan, and I talk about how some cohorts consistently vote more Democratic or Republican than others—but even if 60% of the people in a cohort vote for one party, you still have 40% voting the other way. It should be possible to set aside the more extreme claims of generational behavior while still recognizing that underlying it all is something real.
P.S. More on this from Palko.
Cohort experience is real. Generation labels are bullshit: “The generation labels mean nothing. It’s time to retire them” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/07/generation-labels-mean-nothing-retire-them/
The whole tag: https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/tag/generations/
The variation of Menand’s argument i more-or-less buy is that the Boomers at least sort of make sense as a generation, (although one should always be at least a bit suspicious of analysis at the generation level), but most subsequent “generations” rest on weaker definitional underpinnings and are therefore much less useful.
What about the generations preceding the Boomers? (I’m in the “silent generation”).
Isn’t the statistical question whether generation is a discrete or continuous variable? I accept that circumstances differ and are important but I don’t know that any arbitrary binning of “generations” makes sense. This should be somewhat answerable from the data – and probably depends on the context since politics, economics, art, etc. may well differ in how much sense binning makes. A further question would then be whether generation might be better represented by the underlying variables that differ across generations (economic conditions, recency of wars, etc.) – if generation is a proxy for these factors, then the question shifts to whether there is an empirical basis for binning those variables rather than measuring them continuously.
Philip, Dale:
Yeah, I agree that cohorts are continuous, not discrete, also that there’s huge variation of people within any cohort.
Still, I felt that Menand missed the point when he wrote, “the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.” I think he missed the point in a practical way—there are differences between these generations! They’ve lived through different things!—and also he missed it in a theoretical way, in that there are good reasons to think that people growing up under different circumstances will think about the world differently.
I’m happy to retire generation labels but not to dismiss the whole idea by analogizing to astrology.
Analogously, denying the difference between “middle income families” and “low income families” would be foolish. But the differences due to income changes from $10K to $15K to $20K….. are much more revealing. I would only want to talk about differences between low and middle income families if those categories (bins) are natural bins in the data.
If something like willingness to get vaccinated appears to depend on income, I’d much rather say something like “each extra $10,000 in family income is associated with x% increase in likelihood of getting vaccinated” than simplifying it to “middle income families are more likely to get vaccinated than low income families.” Generations are only slightly better defined than income categories. In both cases, I’d prefer the bins, if used at all, are derived from the data rather than a priori imposed on it.
Species, cultures, and generations all represent to some extent “arbitrary binning” as Dale puts it, but that does not make them any less useful. Especially, since small differences between groups can have enormous impacts. Take the recent debates about whether Russia was bound to return to authoritarianism because of its culture. Even a small a difference in Russian culture could have a hugh impact. If Russians more tolerant of authoritarianism were concentrated in the government and in leading industries in the 1990s, which they most definitely were, then a small difference between our population and Russia’s population in terms of tolerance for authoritarianism have made a hugh difference in terms of its ability to resist the slide back toward authoritarianism. This is how evolution works. It is how history works. Small differences have enormous impacts. So, I think noting those differences is important as long as we don’t fall into foolish stereotypes.
I often wish (1) I had majored in philosophy in college and (2) had tried to write something on the Philosophy of Generalizations or some such. It covers so much in life.
There two types of people in the world. Those who divide people into two types of people and those who don’t.
I agree. For example, the dreaded “sex and gender” wars are about what makes a category real, and what definition of gender to use. The drama will not die down until there is a working agreement on a model which is simple enough for bureaucracies to use, like there was in the late 20th century that socially-constructed gender is laid atop binary biological sex.
Sean:
There are technical challenges; see here.
Andrew: you are so prolific!
Yes, and eg. sports organizations have been wrestling with the problem of how to define sex for decades too. But the more people who understand some of the challenges, whether biological or philosophical, the more likely that we can find a new working solution.
The boundaries between countries are socially constructed, but that social construction makes them actually real & meaningful (and can determine what language people speak on the different sides). The generations are not similarly distinct via law, although there are laws that make distinctions based on age (whether to drink vote, run for various offices, etc). Age is continuous variable, and generational names are lousy way of organizing them.
Living through different experiences (in some broad strokes) doesn’t translate into a recipe for how to meaningfully categorize people as being different as a result of different experiences. The potential for basically arbitrary distinctions is large.
Plus, I would imagine that if you categorize all experiences, there are far more that are alike across generations than there are that are different.
Then you add in the intra-generational diversity.
Several commenters have objected to using labels of discrete bins, when age and “generation born into” are continuous variables. But efficient communication is almost impossible without the use of such discrete labels.
Age is continuous … so should we stop using discrete labels such as “old”, “middle aged”, “child”, “toddler”, etc.? And instead say “people over 65”, “1-2 year olds”, etc.?
Similarly “blue” is a discrete label; should we use RGB color numbers instead to describe the color of the sky? Sometimes the answer is yes, if I’m working on an electronic image but almost always it’s better to say “blue” than some RGB color range.
We use discrete labels for continuous quantities all the time, because it’d be silly and inefficient not to.
That doesn’t mean that all of these labels are useful. I rarely use the generational labels because I can only remember the starting and ending years of the Baby Boomers; the other borders always seem arbitrary.
The shared experiences are real though; for older Baby Boomers the “I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news” moment was JFK’s assassination. For younger people it might be the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, or the World Trade Center attacks.
As a late boomer, I was just a bit too young to remember JFK’s assassination; I’m in a narrow band of men who never had to register for the draft (because we turned 18 after Ford ended it and before Carter re-instated it) and also a narrow band for whom the “I remember where I was” moment was not JFK, Challenger, or 9-11 WTC, but instead John Lennon’s assassination.
I liked Menand’s articles in the New Yorker until he wrote about something I knew about from personal experience (the left in the 60s).
A Gell-Mann awakening! (Cf. Gell-Mann Amnesia.)
Anecdotally, I saw a tremendous difference in the first managers I had, who had fought in WWII, from the next “generation” of managers. The first group believed in training their employees to be their eventual replacements, loyalty down as well as loyalty up, and “if a factory foreman has done a good job for GE for 20 years, he (or she) deserves a job until retirement”. (Especially if they have kids in school.) The first Plant Manager I had was replaced by Welch because he told Welch, “I’ve already cut all the fat. You’re asking me to cut muscle and bone. I can’t do it.” His successor in his first speech told us, “Look to your right and and left. In six months one of them will not be here.” Welch took over GE in 1980. By 1985 most of the WWII managers in my department were gone, forced into early retirement at best, as we went from the #1 turbine engineering department in the world (ranked by Power Magazine) to barely surviving. As for training, one of Welch’s “from the gut” ideas was, “Why do we have training courses? Why not just farm out the training to universities and only hire people with Master’s Degrees?”
I know the sociopaths tend to rise to the top in large organizations, but that seemed like a big step change. So I concur that there can be significant and general changes from generation to generation, influenced by historical events. Some of which have a tendency to get me started.
Egotists like Welch and McKinsey consultant schlemiels like the Bobs from Office Space have been the death of us…
“sex, drugs, and rock and roll aren’t going anywhere”
I thought two of the three are experiencing an often-commented-on decline?
Only two?
There’s still an opioid crisis going on, though its victims are disproportionately boomers.
I was about to write “all three” but then checked https://ourworldindata.org/illicit-drug-use .
One of the more vexing things about generational cohorts has been the manner in which they are used. Or perhaps more accurately, abused.
AG reasonably states: “…there’s no sudden difference between people born in 1964 and people born in 1965.” That’s true. But Philip Cohen’s comment about cohort experience being a reality also strikes me as solid because there is a distinct difference between someone born in 1957 and someone born in 1964.
In the business world at least, the way these labels are used has taken on a horoscope-like function that reminds me of nothing so much as the talk of the “generation gap” I recall from my youth.
Such use, I often think, results as a direct outgrowth of aligning of these experiential cohorts with demographics. Strauss & Howe, who outlined the theory of generational succession, never insisted on such alignment. In fact, as I recall they define Boomers as people born between 1943 and 1960.
Those are different dates than we commonly see. Yet that period passes what I call the rock star test since it includes two members of The Stones, one Beatle and half of The Doors. It also accounts for why those of us born at the tail end of that demographic surge don’t really believe we have much in common with those born at the beginning.
All of the above is narrative. My graduate work was done in survey research and generational cohorts using the Strauss & Howe defined periods were my secret analytical weapon. Differences that appeared meaningless at first emerged more starkly when I applied them, no statistical acrobatics required.
A tool is a tool. If cohorts help tease out differences I’m all for them. But a misshapen tool, say a screwdriver sharpened into an awl, will never serve its original purpose. And that’s what seems to have happened here.
Speaking of Beatles, Stones, and Doors, my informal survey has pretty much all the great rockers having been born in the 1940 to 1949 decade. Which I always thought mucks up the concept of baby boomers (usually immediately post-war through some or all of the 1960s). I suppose those blokes were the guys who spoke to we boomers, and thus needed to be a tad older in order to be there with the results of their creativity while we were still teenagers.
The argument that within-cohort differences make the cohort definition invalid is an interesting one, e.g. that there are lots of conservative boomers. Still, there are economic trends that tie us together, and states of mind sorts of things, e.g. US median income has been going up, but we think all the post-boomers, X-ers and Y-ers are all being nothing but barristas. Whatever.
There is an overlap between this issue and clustering (Christian Hennig please weigh in here). The issue of whether people born during a specific time period differ from those born in another period can be though of a what clustering of people constitute a generation. Generation X or Y always struck me like many marketing clusters – chosen for their ease of interpretation rather than being empirically derived. For some contexts, I imagine the usual generational definitions may convey meaningful information, but for others I am not so sure.
I agree and disagree insofar as I think the extent to which generational categorization makes sense depends on how rapidly society is changing, the rate of technological change in particular.
I’m an older millennial, born in 1985. I was in double-digits by the time I first had (awful dial-up) Internet. I was in high school when people started to get cell phones, and even then you’d rarely see people actually using them. I was a senior in college when people started using smart phones. Compare that to a younger millennial, born in say 1995. They probably can’t even remember a time before high-speed cable Internet or cell phones and grew up on apps. That’s a big difference, and I don’t identify at all with anyone born after, say, 1992, even though we’re shoehorned into the same “generation.”
The faster technology changes, the smaller a meaningful generational window can be. That window is rapidly narrowing to the point of losing its analytical utility as well.
The business about ‘generations’ being as meaningless as astrological signs is ridiculous and easily shown to be so. To give one of a zillion examples, I did a search for [poll opinions gay marriage by age group] and came up with a Pew research poll from 2019 which has a plot at the bottom of the page where you can select ‘generation’ and get a plot of “percent who favor” as a function of year, with a different line for each ‘generation.’ “Millennials” are about 30 percentage points higher than “the Silent Generation”, as they have been ever since people started asking them the question in 2004. I don’t think a similar plot that used astrological sign rather than ‘generation’ would show anything like this. Does Menand really think it would? I very much doubt it. I’m giving this example because it’s the first one I thought of, and searched for, but I would expect to find large generational differences on a wide range of attitudes.
Phil:
I agree, and indeed much of Menand’s article is interesting, which is what makes his astrology statement particularly annoying. All I can think is that he wrote it without thinking it through, and then nobody looked at it and did a sanity check. Kind of like that quote from a few years ago, that “most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent ‘suicides’ in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.” It’s possible to say snappy-sounding things that at first can seem reasonable but on reflection are ridiculous—but people don’t always do that reflection.
It’s a long article. I thought kind of rambling – to the extent that I had trouble identifying exactly what his thesis was. But I don’t think it was something as simplistic as arguing that you can’t identify any association between generations and how people will answer certain questions. And saying that you can identity such trends isn’t (necessarily) the same thing as saying that you can identity meaningful generalizations.
Do you disagee with his following comparison to astrological signs?
> In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.
I have never understood the generational analysis of opinions and attitudes as, to me, they are completely confounded with length of time lived. I am a boomer (even got called that recently) and a grumpy old bas*&^d, I wasn’t always a grumpy old bas*&^d but have grown into the role. To compare my attitudes now with a millennial ignores the 40 odd years of change that has happened to me. I am sure the Millennials attitudes will also change over the next 40 years so will they all be grumpy old bas*&^ds when they are my age? Who knows.
Sgurr:
This confounding that you mention is a well-known issue in sociology; it’s called the age-period-cohort problem. See for example here.
This may be a quibble, but the numbers don’t really support the claim that economic growth sputtered after the Baby Boomers grew up. If you look at a chart of per capita U.S. GDP, the long-term growth rate is remarkably constant over time. The most impressive period was actually in the nineties. Meanwhile you can look at the late fifties, for example, and find pretty anemic growth.
Some people might argue that total GDP is more important than per capita GDP, but it’s the latter that has the most impact on people’s individual experiences with the economy.
You ignore distributional changes in emphasizing per capita GDP; I believe growth in income inequality since the 50’s is considerable (sorry for not supplying sources), and this change may have more social significance, as comparative rather than absolute changes may be more psychological significant.
“psychological” should be “psychologically”
It is called the Cantillion effect. The most powerful and well-connected generally get the newly printed money first. That is why we saw price inflation in stocks and wherever the government got heavily involved (healthcare, education, real estate) before it showed up elsewhere.
We’ll, just have to say this, anecdotally of course. I perceived some time ago I was in a different ‘generation’ than Baby Boomers or Silent. This came home to me at a company (extremely large Silicon Valley) which had a seminar for management on dealing with the ‘new’ generations. All was cool while they powered through slides of definitions of the groups, and etc.
Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t in any of the defined groups, having been born in ‘43.
Well, I was shocked, heh. But I got over it quickly. Of course I came up with my own definition of my cohort: the Rock and Roll Generation. It is based on a simple question: where were you the Day the Music Died? I know exactly.
In any case, R&R grew up right in front of us. All the shades of gray of rock after that really don’t make much of a difference…
Does that really make us a definably different cohort? Hard to say, but I’ll pick out a few things. We noticed that people over 45 acted old, we would never do that. We have refused to grow old (or up)
Our economic habits were transitional from depression era parents and parents enjoying a really good life. So we saved like hell. We had a girl friend and wife that actually started on the pill just before going to college. Profound! Economists are still busy on the implications of this.
Finally, the sexual revolution was just after us… need I say more? (Well, see above about birth control)
So, this is all anecdotal blather save that there are real changes going on in time that are measurable.
BIllb said, “Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t in any of the defined groups, having been born in ‘43”
Born in ’43 technically puts you into the silent generation. (But I think you are talking about the characteristics of the “generations”, rather than the technical definitions.)
The ‘Baby Boomers’ were the Bretton Woods kids – who, not knowing where they were coming from, traded the desire for enlightenment for the sense of entitlement, thereby bestowing the Reagan era upon us. The spurious growth of the 1990s was based on a shift in public expenditure, made possible by the ‘Peace dividend’.
To get a grasp of this, I suggest you take a close look at the generation which reached adulthoot before WWI (called The Great War in those days, as if there is anything ‘great’ about war) and then take another look at the boomers – as they were their grandchildren.
Reading Karl Mannheim might prove useful, too.
Will anyone take the opposite side of my bet that I personally have significantly more traits in common with my astrological sign than with my generational classification?
By making that bet you give away the fact that you don’t identify with your “generation”, so, no, I’ll not take the other side of that bet.
Me, I identify with the counterculture part of the boomers: around 1970, I wasn’t convinced we’d make it to 1984.
But the existence of counterexamples doesn’t deny the utility of generalizations. This is, after all, a statistics blog, and we’re looking for the where the median lies, right?
Why do I fear that public policy based on the median will adversely impact me?
Can you imagine what kind of laws they might make based on generational differences that don’t apply to me? Will they force me to get a vaccine because of my age, for example, when I’m one of the outliers that’s been a germophobe for decades and can avoid Covid through non-pharmaceutical interventions and self-isolating outdoors? Is the risk of death worth not being controlled into letting them stick a needle into me (not that there’s anything wrong with needles per se)? Why would I want to live in a society that enforces conformity to an arbitrary, fickly-drawn median?
That specific example of a negative impact you identify seems pretty tiny. But sure, there’s rigid policies designed only around the median that are problematic. But those policies would be just as problematic if they are designed around outliers. I’m not sure if you’ll be particularly pleased if you go into an old people’s home and all the stairs are designed for the 1% of the population of that cohort who have the best mobility.
I think your statement suggests your preference for less interventionalist policies. But that’s a tangential discussion to generational studies and targeted policies. A less targetted policy approach could be *more* interventionalist and conformist (oh actually, we’ve decided that actually everyone, regardless of age, has to take vaccines, and undergo cancer screening), a more targetted approach could be less (hey, maybe your age group actually doesn’t need X Y Z, or just really hates this stuff to the extent that it’d be counterproductive). Indeed we might determine that “oh right, folks of this particular generation are totally different from each other”.
It’s a separate issue to collecting the data to actually inform those decision.
I will bet that (1) no one can meaningfully identify all your traits and, (2) I could differentially “bin” your traits to show more commonality with your astrological sign OR your generational classification, depending on which determination I wanted to confirm.
+1
I should preface my remark by saying I’m not a statistician.
But, as best as I can make out, it seems pretty absurd to insist that the important criterion of distinct generations might be whether there are greater differences between members of two generations than between them.
In the social sciences, doesn’t Cohen’s d give us some insight into what might be a meaningful distinction? But a large Cohen d of .81 corresponds to a between group variance component of only .14. And by my simple calculation, a between group variance component of .5 — the breakeven point for between and within components — is a Cohen d of 2 — a full 2 standard deviations.
Why would any difference less than 2 standard deviations be uninteresting to us?
…greater differences between members of two generations than *within* them
IMHO the following is analogous to the problem of defining “generations”:
In general (on the Earth’s surface) it’s light outside at noon, and dark outside at midnight. [I’ll ignore arctic/antarctic summer & winter.] In the evening it gradually gets dark outside, but there is no time at which there’s a visible distinction in outdoor light levels between “now” and “1 second ago”.
Yet the words “day” and “night” remain useful, even though the boundary between them is a bit fuzzy.
Yep. This covers a tremendous variety of issues. Yet a standard legal argument is essentially, “Aha! So you admit you can’t delineate day from night. Therefore these categories are arbitrary and capricious.” This recurs all the time.
Come to think of it, Socrates did a version of the same act, didn’t he.
Might I extend Socrates’s argument? If you admit that you arbitrarily and capriciously code corner cases as either day or night, because your model doesn’t allow for their coexistence, then you go on from your model to make public policy, is it possible that the model and policy is useful to you and harmful to me, especially if I live a different lifestyle from you? Rather than try to fix your model, is it easier simply to silence me (bans, or perhaps hemlock?) and thus cleanly eliminate the individuals for whom your useful distinctions are not really useful?
So you don’t use timezones then?
> is it easier simply to silence me (bans, or perhaps hemlock?)
I think generally the strategy is to wait until the individual gets over it, because all policies (and the absence of policies) will inconvenience someone or other, and someone who moans about even as little a thing like that will find plenty more stuff to moan about soon enough.
Did Chris Knight (who lived isolated in the Maine woods for 27 years) need timezones? When I’m out immersed in nature for a week, do I even need a clock?
Aren’t we talking about much more than timezones, though? If you say “just as it can’t be sunny and raining at the same time, you can only be one gender” or something, aren’t you a) ignorant of real world weather and b) harming transgender people?
Do your comments about moaning reveal more about you than about trying to improve a model so it handles contradictions such as simultaneous rain and sun, gender fluidity, generational cross-identification, etc. without simply ignoring them?
“all policies (and the absence of policies) will inconvenience someone or other,”
Isn’t the promise of technology that you can write a program that will be all things to all people? Or have you assumed that away?
Can you say stuff without phrasing it as a question?