The Pew Research Centre announced recently that it will define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation, embracing a slightly narrower range of years than the ones used by the United States Census Bureau. It would have been better, though, if it had announced the end of what I call the “generation game” — the insistence on dividing society into groups based on birth year and imputing different characteristics to each group.
Yes, limited insights can be gleaned from thinking of humans in terms of generations, but this ultimately does more harm than good by obscuring the individual factors that actually shape our attitudes, politics and opportunities.
To see what’s wrong with the idea, take a look at American millennials. In seemingly endless essays in recent years, they’ve been derided as lazy and narcissistic or defended as creative and committed to social change. But these all sound like characteristics that the old have ascribed to the young since the dawn of time. Similar terms were applied to the “slacker” Generation X and before that, the baby boomers. It’s true that the current cohort (the demographic term for a group of people born around the same time) of young people is different in important ways from earlier cohorts. It’s more ethnically diverse, with a smaller proportion of whites and more of most other racial and ethnic groups. But diversity is a characteristic of a population, not, in most cases, of individuals. A relatively small proportion of millennials personally embody ethnic diversity in the sense of identifying with more than one race or ethnicity.
Compared to the population as a whole, a larger proportion of millennials are college-educated, and a smaller proportion live in rural areas. Like other urban and educated voters, urban and educated millennials tend to vote Democratic. Rural millennials, meanwhile, share many of the attitudes of older rural voters who voted for Trump.
Activism by high school students in response to the Parkland, Florida, shooting has inspired interest in the generation younger than millennials, known as “Gen Z” or “iGen.” A recent Washington Post essay declared: “Millennials disrupted the system. Gen Z is here to fix the mess.” It argued that members of this cohort “value compromise” as “a byproduct of their diversity and comfort with working with peers from different backgrounds.”
But given that state schools have been resegregating for decades, to assume that the demographic makeup of a generation would have a meaningful impact on most individual Gen Z members’ experiences with diversity seems misguided.
Although much of its current popularity can be traced to the influential 1991 book Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss, generational thinking dates back to the second half of the 19th century. Sarah Laskow of The Atlantic explained in 2014 that philosophers at this time were, in the words of the sociologist Karl Mannheim, “anxious to find a general law to express the rhythm of historical development, based on the biological law of the limited lifetimes of man.” But understanding societal phenomena through the lens of groups of people born around the same time has always had its limits.
Avoiding the draft
For example, it’s true that for young men coming-of-age during the Vietnam War, being born in a particular year (and, thanks to the draft lottery, on a particular day) could be life shaping. But even here, an individual’s class was a factor in whether he actually went to war — men from privileged backgrounds had many options to avoid the draft, the burden of which fell mainly on the working class.
Like war service, entering the labour market at a time of recession, as most millennials did, can be difficult. But race and class are more important in affecting how this experience plays out for individuals.
Take white millennial college graduates: Yes, they’re part of an age cohort that has experienced worse economic conditions than graduates of the preceding generation — but that doesn’t give us a particularly meaningful understanding of their plight, given that they are still better off when it comes to income than the average non-college-educatedworker of any age.
Some may argue that the generation game, if intellectually vacuous, is basically harmless. But dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.
The pattern of inherited privilege points to yet another reality that the generation game ignores: the decline of social mobility between generations and the rise of what the French economist Thomas Piketty has called a “patrimonial society.” When it comes to wealth and its accompanying privileges, the wealth of the previous generation of one’s own family matter more than whether your birth year falls on one or other side of some arbitrary boundary.
Today’s young people may choose political action aimed at reversing these trends or to let them continue and accelerate. But their choices will be determined by their political judgements and personal commitments, not by a number on a birth certificate.
— New York Times News Service
John Quiggin is a senior research fellow in economics at the University of Queensland.
