Stop Stereotyping Age Groups
What I read: It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations” by Louis Menand. Published October 11, 2021.
Despite being well into my 60s, I hang out with lots of younger people. I’ve always had a diverse range of age demographics among my social contacts. Many of my closest friends are in their 20s and 30s. Perhaps this is why I bristle a bit anytime I hear a sweeping generalization lobbed at what we’ve come to define as the younger generation.
I’ve heard it all from my older peers about the young. They don’t work hard enough. They don’t have good values. They are addicted to social media. The blanket dismissiveness of the young is lazy thinking that simply confirms biases that make someone’s life seem better because they can point to another group and declare “I’m better than them.”
At the same time, I’ve heard a lot of erroneous stereotyping of older people by the young. They’re out of touch with contemporary culture. They can’t learn technology. They don’t understand contemporary issues. They complain too much about trendy music.
While I know we can all find examples of young and old conforming to such stereotypes, most of the time they’re wrong. It’s often a case of the fallacy of incomplete evidence, popularly referred to as cherry picking, “pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.” (Wikipedia)
As with much of current culture, money is a driving force for compartmentalizing people into generations and especially carving out younger generations. Starting around the 1940s, when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print, those wanting to expand their market for the things they had to sell began to recognize that a new market had emerged.
By the mid-1950s, 84% of high school age Americans were in school and eventually by the late 1960s college enrollment had climbed significantly. In 1969, more than half of the population was under the age of 25. Capitalism is always looking for new marketing targets and these younger people were ripe for separating from their cash.
Eventually the demographics of the United States began to shift. Fast forward to the present and that youth market has shrunk. But that doesn’t stop businesses from focusing on selling to the young. The concept of “generations” fits nicely into this marketing narrative.
Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.
Around 1800, the concept morphed into a belief that perhaps people born within a certain time period (usually 30 years) belong to a “generation.” This stance had no foundation based in science or data of any kind, but it was a convenient way for some scientists and intellectuals to make sense of a topic for which they had endless opinions, the difficult to pin down causes of social and cultural change.
Over time, how generations were assessed changed. These days the time span of a generation is perceived to be about 15 years give or take. Magically those born within that limited timeframe are supposed to demonstrate a bunch of similar characteristics that set them apart from people born at other times. When you think about it, that’s a bizarre contention. But the belief in generational similarities is so pervasive that they often roll off our tongues with barely a thought. This is not helpful.
This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.
Compartmentalizing people into neat chunks by age is of course silly. It makes no sense when one thinks about it for a moment. But we do it nonetheless.
We also generalize about decades in much the same way, and we probably lump the years that pass into 10-year segments simply because we have 10 fingers with which to count. Also convenient, but also a simplistic solution to make sense of complex information.
In the book “The Generation Myth” by Bobby Duffy, Duffy concludes that people can’t be so easily assessed based on the age group into which they were born. People in different age groups are more alike than different. And one need only look at the political divides fueled by extreme media outlets and pundits to see that faux generational descriptions are used to stoke the masses into leaning a certain way politically.
There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.
The entire “wokeness” social discussion is annoying and clearly an attempt to squelch the normal flow of political change necessary for a healthy society.
As an older technologist myself who has always easily learned new ways of using computers and digital devices and services, it was heartening to read this by Menand.
There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”
Menand points out a 39,000-word article by Charles Reich, a 42-year-old Yale Law School professor, that appeared in The New York Times 51 year ago. The article begins like this.
There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.
Reich was a resident of my home city, San Francisco, in 1967 during what’s often referred to as the Summer of Love. The flower-power counterculture impressed him so much that he became convinced that the best way for society to improve was to follow the lead of young people.
But Reich’s conclusions were based on observing a relatively tiny number of people who had aligned values that pushed against the choices of previous generations. Those hippie-leaning people were, however, not a representative sample of 60s youth.
Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.
Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.
Menand’s article is a superb dissection and repudiation of the overly used convenience of lumping people into age groups (generations). The last paragraphs seem particularly relevant considering the false age differences attributed to political affiliations and leanings.
Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. 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.
Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle.
I hope we will all stop flippantly referencing age groups and assigning certain characteristics to them. It’s silly. It’s not based on data or science. It serves no purpose but to cloud the reality of complex nuance with the simplicity of specificity.
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