252. The Theory of Generations

Generations are used to explain everything from the state of the economy to attitudes about sexuality, but do they *really* explain anything?

Additional thanks to Stefan Kehlenbach for his assistance with this episode!

- Links for the Curious -

9. The Sociological Problem of Generations (Mannheim, K., 1928) -
11. Researching Homeownership Inequalities: A Life-Cycle Perspective (Moulton, S., 2022) -
12. A Sociological Analysis of “OK Boomer” (Mueller, J. & McCollum, J., 2021) -
13. Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation (Murdock, G. & McCron, R., 2006) -

[johnkinsey]

Dude, fantastic work, this is an amazing insight. Well done

[joeyjoejoeshabadoo]

Absolutely agree, but id posit that you can do it for any arbitrary groups, such as race, culture, sex, music, sport teams, etc...

[Tmesis___]

I watch any of your videos as soon as they come out, this is my favourite channel and somehow YouTube fails to recommend me this video

[bthomson]

My brain is going to mush! I need a difficult, thorny, involved and wonderfully dense topical video! We rely on you to fight ignorance and tedium! Actually I hope you are recharging your batteries and living life to the fullest!

[Dan-hwiu]

Fun red herring: "Generational differences are less predictive of home ownership than things like class, or race..."

1. In other words, regarding class: purchasing power is predictive of...power to purchase (homes). This is almost tautological and thus misleading when used to downplay generational effects.

2. You can't dismiss one predictive factor because another one exists. Both can be valid, and they often aren't mutually exclusive.

I recommend watching economics professor Scott Galloway's latest TED talk, which explores the sobering issue of generational wealth gap. It's shocking, but important to hear.

[undercoverduck]

I honestly don't even know what generation I'm supposed to be a part of. Always felt like astrology but for people who are way too obsessed with age to me.

[String.Epsilon]

For some stuff, the strong adherents to generational cohorts also seem to forget that people can change their minds. And as you rightly pointed out their material circumstances can (and do) also change. Cohorts based on lived experience are probably much more useful in both regards. Living through a nationwide catastrophe might inspire certain ideas and behaviors, but not everyone of a generation experiences such events the same. The 9/11 thing for example: I do remember that day, but for me it was a thing that happened very far away in a place I knew basically nothing of at the time. So the emotional impact is entirely different than someone of the same as as me who lived in NYC at the time. But even within a country (or city), the same events can play out differently for people. A drought and food shortage may not inflict the same hardship of a rich industrialist who owns half the grocery stores in the city, for example.

[Infantry]

I have heard this idea, that imagining generational divides is more hurtful than helpful, some years ago. Enough that I have actively scrubbed my online content from hearing people talk about it as though it were a true thing. I'm glad to hear that it's being less relied upon for studies.

Thanks for this breakdown, interesting to think about this rhetorical device as a tool, and how that helps or hurts different political or click bait-y goals.

[michaelcherry]

I count as a "Boomer" (born 1960) but the thing that has always amazed me is how adaptable the generations can be. My grandparents were born in the Victorian era (1880 for my grandfather and 1888 for my grandmother) and both lived to see the moon landing in 1969. When they grew up, the major technologies were electricity and telephones and where they lived for a good part of their adult lives in Northern Alberta, they had neither. And yet, at the age of 89 and 81 respectively, they sat in front of the television watching man walk on the moon. In their younger years, both the idea of sending people to the moon and being able to see pictures at great distances were the stuff of Jules Verne fantasy.
The difficulty with trying to put "generations" into neat categories is that you run into the main problem when dealing with people: we are all agents of chaos and chaos is not exactly predictable. However, even though we live in a very chaotic, analogue world, we still insist on thinking in yes/no, good/bad binary. We want instant, neat categorization and when something does not fit into the box that we have prepared for it, we get confused. "What's that you say? A Millennial with good table manners? IMPOSSIBLE!!!" Categories are useful for organizing and analyzing data, but it is a mistake to think that they are hard and fast definitions.

[threethrushes]

People who try to pigeon-hole others should be ignored.

I don't identify with any race, gender, nationality, generation.

[TheGemsbok]

Sure, but people who have played through Myst just _are_ better than everyone else.

[bthomson]

So very sorry to hear about the loss of your stuff! Hope the insurance does what it should? Also hope your belief in human nature is not dinged? Best!😎

[Fiddling_while_Rome_burns]

I think Generationalism is thing: as a member of Gen X, as a youth I nihilistically rebelled against and tried to destroy everything every previous generation believed in. Now as an adult I feel obliged to nihilistically rebel against and destroy everything every subsequent generation believes in.

As for your point on news agencies not touching wealth inequality and feeding generational differences. I would call that a red herring. Talking about solving homelessness, poverty, workers rights, low pay and so on, costs the wealthy money. Changing to liberal social issues costs the rich nothing. Free healthcare requires a massive tax hike for the wealthy, transgender rights cost them nothing. The news agencies are owned by and serve the interest of the rich. So there job is to fill their pages with liberal social issues to divert people's attention from economic reform that doesn't serve the rich's interest.

[Xob_Driesestig]

7:41 Is this reacting to BritMonkey's ''Britain is a dump'' video? (For those that don't want to watch his whole video, skip to the "No country for young men" section) I do think that class is a much much more important framing than age, and his video veers into rhetoric more than analysis in a lot of places. However, I do think a couple of the policies he pointed out are clear examples of older people being privileged (in some aspects), and his hypothesis that this is for political reasons does seem plausible (especially for the one where he provides a clip of a conservative MP bragging about it to an audience).

[CamilaEspia]

I started an appliance the second the distortion starts on your video and it made me think my phone was fried.
***
Anyway. This generational framing is really insidious. I don't think it's a conspiracy of sorts by some nefarious forces, just something that opportunists latch on to, but it aligns with a lot of misreadings of history as a whole. Neanderthals and anything other than ancient sapienses were thought to be a ton of what is now understood as very crude racist caricatures, until they were instead interpreted as honored (direct) ancestors of certain modern human groups, and their image has been rehabilitated. Those ancient groups or ancient cultures and ethnicities get the same reading as generational framing, if you look at the large scale; if you look into individuals, the framing becomes intrinsic unchangeable personality traits derived from personality tests and all of this, all of it, all the misreadings of proto-sapiens, ancient cultures, preceding cultures, ethnicities, generations and personalities are nothing but horoscopes. Seriously. You were born under this sign which is good when we like it and bad when we don't AMA but it doesn't matter, all answers are the same.

[JohnDoe-phif]

As always, the problem and the solution is that we need more statistics...

[undercoverduck]

Generationalism, or as the youths like to call it: how to get your confounding factor published

[somnambuplant]

i remember some meme about how generations are a distraction from working class solidarity, i think from the Citations Needed podcast

[landspide]

Revolutions and Ages are more sticky...

[EricaCalman]

It's a pet peeve but I am endlessly bothered by the inconsistent boundaries for generations, even to the extent they make sense at all. Like the reason "boomers" are a thing is because birth rates went up after WWII and then down around 1965, a nice 20 year block. Birth rates also went back up around 1985, again a nice even 20 year block that also corresponds to birth rates. For some reason though, people want to define millennial at 1980-1995, a 15 year block that straddles birth rates at random. It gets even worse with Z and alpha. By my definitions zoomers are 2005-2025 and alpha hasn't even started but people have all sorts of definitions that make absolutely no sense, not to mention none of the definitions are that consistent. To the extent any group identity defines anything its class not age.