The Generation Divide E-Book

Bobby Duffy

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Subtle and compelling.' Observer 'One of the best books of 2021.' The Times Are we in the middle of a generational war? Are Millennials really entitled 'snowflakes'? Are Baby Boomers stealing their children's futures? Are Generation X the saddest generation? Will Generation Z fix the climate crisis? In this original and deeply researched book, Professor Bobby Duffy explores whether when we're born determines our attitudes to money, sex, religion, politics and much else. Informed by unique analysis of hundreds of studies, Duffy reveals that many of our preconceptions are just that: tired stereotypes. Revealing and informative, Generations provides a bold new framework for understanding the most divisive issues raging today: from culture wars to climate change and mental health to housing. Including data from all over the globe, and with powerful implications for humanity's future, this big-thinking book will transform how you view the world.

Leseprobe

The Generation Divide

‘An insightful read for those interested in understanding changing social attitudes and behaviour, and most importantly Duffy helps to bust damaging myths about generational stereotypes.’

Independent

‘Moaning about young people – much like moaning about old people – is “irresistible”. Duffy offers an authoritative account of why ill feeling is almost always misplaced.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Duffy makes his case persuasively through a great deal of data diving, and his text is peppered with numerous well-chosen and telling graphs.’

New Statesman

‘As Duffy shows, the growing gaps between rich and poor dwarf any changes between generations. The real story of the divisions that affect us is found in wealth, wages and income.’

Literary Review

‘One of the best books of 2021.’

The Times

‘Essential for anyone who truly wants to understand our world.’

Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia

‘Startling, witty and erudite. This is a must-read, complete analysis of our times – a portrait of the way we live now in all its changing confusions down the generations. Read this to explode the myth of manufactured generational wars.’

Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist

‘Brilliant. Duffy has built a powerful toolkit for understanding the forces and relationships that shape the world we live in – and the one our children will inherit.’

Rafael Behr, author of Politics: A Survivor’s Guide

‘This important book deserves our attention. Duffy casts new light on the endlessly fascinating issue of what links the generations and how they differ.’

Lord David Willetts, author of The Pinch

‘The most comprehensive, compelling, and careful account for how and why the generations diverge, come together, and can better connect.’

Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%

‘Bobby Duffy shows that serious generational analysis is indispensable in spotting the fundamental social trends shaping the future. This is a book for anyone, of any generation, who hopes to live and prosper in that future.’

Dan Gardner, co-author of Superforecasting

‘Indispensable... Bobby Duffy is among the most creative and prolific generational analysts anywhere in the world.’

Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University

‘Eye-catching and compelling. To get a reliable glimpse of the future it is essential to have clear picture of the present. The Generation Divide does it better than anything I’ve seen in recent years.’

Trevor Phillips, former Chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights

‘Excellent. Duffy convincingly and comprehensively punctures the myths around generations that have pigeon-holed people for decades.’

Dame Margaret Hodge, former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee

‘A truly brilliant and engaging explanation of a new way to think about how and why we’re changing. Duffy picks clever and often amusing examples to illustrate his analysis, while he also recognises the important concerns we all have about the future and our place in it.’

Dame Louise Casey, former Director General of the Department for Communities and Local Government

A Note About the Author

Bobby Duffy is Director of The Policy Institute at King’s College London and Professor of Public Policy. Formerly Global Director of Ipsos Social Research Institute, he has also been seconded to the British Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and to the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything.

By the same author

The Perils of Perception

TheGenerationDivide

WHY WE CAN’T AGREEAND WHY WE SHOULD

Bobby Duffy

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2021 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books.

Previously published as Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?

Copyright © Bobby Duffy, 2021

The moral right of Bobby Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.

The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 973 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 974 5

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Printed in Great Britain

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For Jimmy, Birdie, Bobby, Mary, Jim, Anne, Jim,Louise, Bridget and Martha – four generations ofmy family who will see 200 years of history

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

The Question of Our Generation

Chapter 1

Stagnation Generation

Chapter 2

Home Affront

Chapter 3

Reaching Higher, Falling Flat

Chapter 4

Happy Now

Chapter 5

A Healthy Future?

Chapter 6

The Sex Recession, Baby Bust and Death of Marriage

Chapter 7

Manufacturing a Generational Culture War

Chapter 8

Constant Crises

Chapter 9

Consuming the Planet

Chapter 10

Us and Them

Chapter 11

The End of the Line?

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Division is a defining feature of generations. We are classified into groups based on when we were born, given snappy, headline-friendly labels, and all our attention is directed to the tensions and conflicts between us.

Classifying ourselves into tribes in this way is a deep-seated human trait – but it exaggerates difference and, too often, entirely invents division.

My central motivation for writing this book is I think that’s a tragedy – because when generational analysis is done well, it reveals important parts of our individual and collective stories that would otherwise remain hidden.

As I’ll outline throughout this book, there are real distinctions between generations. When you were born has had a huge impact on your life, in all sorts of large and small ways – and the different outlooks of emerging generations are perhaps the single most important mechanism that ensures society continues to evolve.

At an individual level, the economic conditions you grew up with will have pushed you down a particular life course, that would have been entirely different if you’d been born just a decade or two earlier or later. In the UK, this is most obvious with home ownership, where you can see how Generation X and Millennials were deflected to much lower levels of owning than they would have expected from their parents’ experience – with all the knock-on effects this has had on their economic security.

Truly generational distinctions are seen in all sorts of smaller ways too. Before starting the analysis for this book, I had no idea that three in ten of the pre-war generation (who’re now all approaching their 80s or older) drink alcohol five or more days a week – or that only 0.2 per cent of Gen Z drink that regularly.

This isn’t just a feature of age, a behaviour that Gen Z will grow into. Instead, this looks like a stable generational behaviour, where the cultural norms that different generations grow up with result in very different relationships with alcohol.

But for each of these real differences, there are many more spurious divides between generations, often created deliberately for clicks or cash.

Perhaps the most destructive is that older generations don’t care about climate change. I’ve written and spoken about this generational myth more than any other since publishing this book – because people are still surprised that it’s fake, and it’s so important to correct. We’ve even done new research since at the Policy Institute at King’s College London, which confirms that older groups are, if anything, more concerned and likely to act than the youngest.

It’s easy to see why we get the wrong impression, as climate campaigns still focus on the fears and anger of young people, and (inadvertently) reinforce the stereotype of an uncaring older generation. But it’s entirely self-defeating to push the ‘selfish Boomer’ meme. If there’s one cause we need to unite people around, rather than divide them, it’s action on climate change.

The UK’s new obsession with the ‘culture wars’ is a second key source of fake division. We’re bombarded with stories of a ‘woke’ generation obsessed with ‘safe spaces’ and creating a ‘cancel culture’. The misdirection here is slightly different to that seen with climate change. It is true that younger generations have a different perspective on shifting social norms compared with older generations – but the key point is that’s always the case.

Younger generations are always more comfortable with shifting cultural tides because they haven’t grown up with older norms. We need to remind ourselves that Baby Boomers were just as different from their parents as young people are from Baby Boomers today: the issues change, but the generational patterns are eerily similar. In fact, it’s pretty much a constant that the youngest generation will be twice as comfortable with the latest shifting cultural norm than the oldest: for Baby Boomers, their emergent issues were women’s roles in the workplace and the acceptability of homosexuality; for young people today, it’s more likely to be gender identity and our views of British history.

The longer-range view that a truly generational perspective provides has left me with one vital, and reassuring, lesson: differences between generations are not just inevitable, they’re essential and beneficial. It’s not something to be feared – or rather, those of us who are now in older generations should take comfort from feeling a little unsettled. Some of the greatest thinkers in history who’ve deeply considered the importance of generational change quickly conclude that the complete absence of tension between generations would be a terrible signal that society has gone stale.

But this positive friction is entirely different from the exaggerated and fabricated divides that infect so much of our generational discussions today. As you’ll learn while reading this book, the fact that we feel so divided between generations right now is more to do with the period we’re living through than unusual generational characteristics.

For me, there are two vital changes in context that help explain that shift. First, we’re living in an incredibly divisive information environment now. The web of communications created by our particularly shrill and partisan media, social media and politics actively promotes the most extreme views and conflict, giving as a very distorted view of reality. As I explored in my previous book, The Perils of Perception, this is a core reason we’re so wrong about core social realities – and it applies equally to how generations are represented. Conflict is clickable, and generations are often in the frontline.

I inadvertently created a very small example of that fake generational division through a new survey we conducted in 2022, which examined how the different generations viewed each other. One of the questions tested a statement based on an interview with TV personality Kirstie Allsopp, where she suggested that young people couldn’t afford to own their own homes because they spent too much on Netflix, gym subscriptions, fancy coffees, delivery food and foreign holidays. Distressingly, half of the public agreed – and, even more distressingly, Gen Z were just as likely to agree as older generations.

Our current cohort of young people have clearly internalised a sense of self-blame, when the much more important explanations for their lower levels of home ownership are the extraordinary decadeslong surge in house prices, stagnating wages and stricter lending rules. As someone tweeted in response to Allsopp’s article: ‘To be fair to Kirstie Allsopp, if you cancelled your Netflix and PureGym subscription and instead saved that £40 a month, as long as the housing market doesn’t go up at all then in just 54 years you’ll have enough for a deposit on an average house.’

But the key lesson for me wasn’t the rights and wrongs of the assertion or even the sadness of how widespread and uniform the victim-blaming of young people was – it was how the results of our poll were reported in the extensive media coverage the study received. The headline across various news-sites was a variation of: Boomers blame Netflix and takeaways for young not owning homes – despite Boomers being no more likely to think that way than any other generation. Media outlets know a lead that invents a generational division, particularly with Boomers as the villains, will be read and shared more.

Our focus on generational divides is not just a media and social media effect, however – there is a second key change in the context. We don’t realise it, but we’re living through a uniquely age segregated period of human history. We’ve drifted apart in where we live, as the populations of small towns and villages have got older, while those in cities have got younger, to a quite remarkable extent.

The same new survey we conducted in 2022 also tested whether we’d noticed this separation – and we have: two-thirds of us correctly say young people are more likely to live in cities and older people outside them. But over half of us say that’s always been the case, when this is actually a new trend that we’ve only seen in the last twenty or thirty years in the UK. We’ve got very used to this division very quickly, when it’s completely unnatural for humans.

This physical separation is not the only way the generations have drifted apart. Our digital lives are now vitally important to who we are and how we connect – but our level and intensity of online engagement still hugely depends on when we were born. As I discuss in later chapters, some of the biggest gaps between the generations remain how much of their lives they spend online, and what they do when they are.

We’ve stumbled into this new generational segregation through a lack of attention – and it’s a double tragedy. Firstly, our lack of contact is the perfect breeding ground for stereotypes, fake arguments and division. But perhaps even worse than that, this new distance between age groups denies us the incredibly well-evidenced benefits to both old and young of intergenerational connection.

However, despite all the real, engineered and exaggerated divisions, I remain optimistic about the future of generational relationships. It’s true that we face serious challenges in our collective loss of hope for a brighter future for younger generations – and these need serious responses that embed a longer-term, generational perspective, as I outline in the conclusions.

But, in the end, what shines through across the actual evidence is how strong the love and care is up and down the generations. We’re deeply connected, directly through our families, but more generally by our strong sense of legacy. Age is a uniquely difficult characteristic around which to attempt to divide people, as we’ll all travel through each different lifestage, if we’re lucky enough. There are so many factors that insulate us from any true ‘generation war’ that even the relentless abuse of generational labelling to divide us seems bound to fail.

Which leads me to the final divide that has become clearer to me since publishing this book. There is a very live debate, particularly in the US (which has lived with more generational analysis and destructive stereotypes for longer than the UK), on whether we should just bin the whole idea. Some US academics have had enough of the bad takes, driven by a mini-industry of cliched press releases based on bad research and commentary from people who call themselves ‘Millennial consultants’.

While I agree with the diagnosis, I can’t agree with the suggested response. My one sentence summary of this book is that generational thinking is a truly big idea that has been horribly corrupted by terrible stereotypes and cliches. But the real value remains, if we discard the fake arguments and focus on the more collective, longer-term perspective a generational frame can give us.

As I hope you’ll see from this book, there is real insight about our past, present and future that we can only get from truly understanding generations. We should defend the big idea and call out the myths and exaggerated divisions, not abandon the field to the Millennial consultants.

TheGenerationDivide

Introduction

The Question of Our Generation

We are teetering on the brink of a generational war. Wherever you look, battles and betrayals across the generations are poisoning relations between old and young. Older people have stolen the future from younger generations, while the young are killing the traditions that older generations hold dear. Emerging ‘social justice warriors’ find themselves facing a ‘war on woke’. Baby Boomers are selfish sociopaths, while Millennials are narcissistic snowflakes.

This, at least, is the endlessly repeated story. But is any of it true?

I began the research that would inspire this book with the intention of separating the myths about different generations from the reality. We seem to intuitively grasp that the concept of generations helps us understand something important about who we are and where we are headed. However, much of what passes as discussion on the topic is based on stereotype and lazy thinking, making it useless or even dangerous. My argument is that, while we can learn something very valuable about ourselves by studying generational dynamics, we will not learn anything from a mixture of fabricated battles and tiresome clichés. Instead, we need to carefully unpick the forces that shape us as individuals and societies; the generation we were born into is merely one important part of the story, alongside the extraordinary power of our lifecycles and the impact of events.

More systematic generational thinking, and the long-term perspective it encourages, will show that the real problem isn’t warfare between generations but a growing separation between the young and the old. It will show us that people’s resentments of other generations are more to do with the changing nature of economic, housing and health inequalities. It will explain how and why our culture is changing, particularly on key issues such as race and gender identity. And it will help us to see how support for political parties is shifting, and to understand whether democracy is really dying. It can tell us a great deal about many of the biggest issues humanity faces, from climate change to our mental health.

Ultimately, it will show that the social progress we’ve come to expect as an inevitable feature of new generations is actually far from inevitable. It is the product of collective intergenerational will, a dedicated desire to protect the opportunities that mean a better future for our children and grandchildren. Instead, their future looks increasingly under threat.

* *

The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased the urgency of this type of generational perspective, not least because the virus itself and the measures that have been introduced to control it have affected different generations in extraordinarily different ways.

Most obviously, the immediate health threat was hugely dependent on your age. For those born at the start of the Second World War or earlier, without vaccinations in play, there was a one in twenty chance of dying if you caught the virus. At the other end of the age spectrum, the probability of dying was vanishingly low. The risk of death doubled with every eight years of age, a generational example of the gruesome exponential curves we’ve learned to dread during the pandemic.1

At the start of the pandemic, this massive disparity led to a spate of commentary fretting that the young would flout the measures to control the virus (‘A Generational War Is Brewing Over Coronavirus’, claimed the Wall Street Journal2). For a brief moment, some called the virus a ‘Boomer remover’, but the term was distasteful to all but a tiny minority and it quickly fizzled out.3 But what really surprised people was the level of solidarity between generations. The overall picture, across countries and age groups, was of incredible compliance with extraordinary measures imposed mainly to protect older generations.

This lack of rebellion from younger generations was despite the fact that they were the ones experiencing the greatest negative economic and educational impacts from lockdown. In the UK, for example, young people are two and a half times as likely to work in the sectors most affected by social distancing measures, such as hospitality.4 In addition to this direct impact, economists also talk about the ‘scarring’ that these types of exceptional shocks leave on an economy, where progress can be lost for good, both for countries and for individuals. While we can’t yet know the scale of this loss, we can be sure that the young will suffer more than the old, because they live with the scars for longer.5 This is an incredible misfortune for younger generations, already disproportionately affected by the 2008 financial crisis – which was previously considered our era-defining economic event. This enormous global recession had already stalled or reversed economic progress for a generation of young people in very many Western countries.

A pandemic where the disease disproportionately affects the old and protective measures disproportionately affect the young seems almost designed to fracture intergenerational ties. But we are only surprised at the real outcome because we have been so conditioned to view generations as opposed factions.

Take climate change, for example. At the end of 2019, Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Just 16 years old, she was the youngest ever recipient of the award. The magazine called her a ‘standard bearer in a generational battle, an avatar of youth activists across the globe’. Her young peers, it suggested, looked to her example in their fights for everything from gun control in the US to democratic representation in Hong Kong and greater economic equality in Chile.

The award was clearly deserved, given Thunberg’s extraordinary campaigning achievements, but is Time’s suggestion that she is at the frontline of a war between old and young correct? It is true that she triggers a lot of ire from a particular type of older (and mostly male) critic. There was Donald Trump, of course, with his suggestion that she needed to work on her ‘anger management problem’. And the television presenter Piers Morgan, who mocked her for claiming that her childhood had been stolen even though she sailed across the Atlantic to New York on a racing yacht. But, as we’ll see, the data on how people really feel about climate change doesn’t suggest it is a simple age-based battle. Climate campaigning, for example, stretches from one end of the lifecycle to the other, from Thunberg and thousands of other young activists at one end, via Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook, the founders of Extinction Rebellion (aged 55 and 48), to the author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben (60), the former US vice president Al Gore (73) and David Attenborough (95).

Concerns about climate change, growing inequality, stalling economic progress and polarizing politics relate to how all generations see the future. They are fundamentally generational issues, because they are connected to our desire to see our children, and their children, do better than us. Our confidence in generational progress was already failing before the pandemic, particularly in many Western economies, and is a key reason why people of all ages are more likely to question whether our economic and political systems are working.

While no simplistic ‘war’ exists between age groups, this sense of stalled progress and future threat is nonetheless stronger in young people. Age has become one of the most prominent political dividing lines in a number of countries, and it seems likely that the pandemic will accelerate these trends. Throughout history, influential thinkers have asserted that tumultuous times awaken generational awareness. One of the fathers of generational thinking, the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, outlined a compelling vision of why it matters, drawing on the upheaval of his own lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century. For Mannheim, generations are not just a group of people born at the same time; they have a social identity formed by common, and often traumatic, experiences.6 We tend to form our value systems and behaviours during late childhood and early adulthood, so major events have a much stronger impact on people who experience them while coming of age. When generations are shaped by different contexts and have different life prospects, the connection between them becomes strained.

As Mannheim understood, periods of rapid technological and social change also increase both the importance and the difficulty of maintaining intergenerational connections. We need to be careful when assessing claims that our own times are changing more quickly than previous eras, as every generation tends to think this, but the speed of adoption and the reach of some modern technologies have been different. While it took decades for the inventions of previous industrial revolutions to be widely adopted, it took just 13 years for the near-global adoption of the central technology of modern life: the smartphone.7 According to the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, a ‘circle of acceleration’ has developed, where ‘technical acceleration tends to increase the pace of social change, which in turn unavoidably increases the experienced pace of life, which then induces an ongoing demand for technical acceleration in the hopes of saving time’.8 Whether our era is experiencing a ‘Great Acceleration’ or not, these technological changes contribute to a growing disconnection between age groups. Today’s generations live increasingly separate lives in distinct physical and digital spaces, allowing deeper misperceptions and stereotypes to breed.

Faltering economic progress, threats that may prove existential for coming generations, and a pace of technological change that splinters the connection between young and old – each of these trends makes generational analysis vitally important in helping us to understand our futures.

A generational perspective also encourages us to take a longer-term view. The ability to envisage a distant future and work towards it is one of our defining characteristics as humans, but in evolutionary terms it is a relatively new skill. We are usually most concerned with the immediate future, vaguely worried about the medium term, and put the long term entirely out of our minds. This is a huge gamble in the face of existential threats like climate change, and means that we often miss the opportunity to actively shape a better future.

However, the generational analysis in this book is not focused solely on these huge social, economic and technological challenges. It will also help us to understand the evolution of our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, across all aspects of life. For example, even apparently minor behaviours, such as whether a person chooses to own and use a car, have shifted significantly in recent decades. Is this because young people today have a different attitude towards fossil fuels, have less money to spend, lead a more urban lifestyle, or are less independent and growing up more slowly? Understanding why these changes are emerging helps us to plan for our likely futures.

My aim is not to prove that everything can be explained by generational differences or that they are always the most important divisions in society. Indeed, a significant part of this book is dedicated to debunking generational myths that distract us from the real trends. My goal is to find out whether and how societies are really changing, and what that might mean for the future.

Our lives in lines

Most people recognize that our current crop of adult generations runs, from youngest to oldest: Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, Baby Boomers and, finally, the oldest living generation, Pre-War – those who were born before the end of the Second World War. Yet we don’t necessarily know what these divisions actually mean. Our primary way of understanding generations is through superficial and poor-quality punditry that identifies a multitude of generational differences that don’t exist. While these fake differences may, on an individual level, seem trivial and sometimes even funny, they collectively set a tone that can infect the opinions and actions of even sensible sceptics. Assertions that all Millennials are either narcissistic, materialistic or civic-minded (depending on who you listen to) don’t help anyone. This multi-million-dollar ‘generation industry’ encourages researchers to reduce vast swathes of the population to a handful of characteristics and behaviours.

Another equally unhelpful strand of generational thinking regards generations as repeated waves of predictable archetypes that each react to the previous one. Developed by US authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in the 1990s, this long-term view suggests that every generation falls into one of four types – Idealist, Reactive, Civic or Adaptive – defined by common characteristics. They claim that these generations have appeared in the same order throughout US history, in an 80-year cycle of crisis and renewal, and that this in turn has driven the dominant social conditions of each era. Their account is fascinating and compelling, but it reinforces our assumptions that generations are irreconcilably different from one to the next, and it represents a dubious reading of history that is closer to astrology than academic study. Their analysis has been embraced by the likes of Al Gore and the Republican strategist Steve Bannon (although to very different political ends) and can feel prophetic now – not least because they predicted that an era of crisis would engulf the mid-2000s to the mid-2020s. It would be foolhardy to bet that the COVID-19 era we are living through will not later be regarded as a historically recognizable crisis. But the fact that the pandemic was instigated by a novel coronavirus that originated in the Wuhan district of China only highlights the absurdity of claiming that this crisis is the result of a particular constellation of generational types and the four-generation cycle of catastrophe that Strauss and Howe claim to have identified.

We have simultaneously gone in two bad directions. One strand of thinking, inspired by Strauss and Howe, zooms out by a million miles and assures us that generations fall into a repeating cycle of types before offering something that resembles a horoscope. The other approach claims that frothy, exaggerated differences in generational characteristics are in fact real, shifting tides.

In contrast, true generational thinking can be a powerful tool that helps us to understand the changes and challenges of our day. It starts with recognizing an underappreciated fact: there are just three explanations for how all attitudes, beliefs and behaviours change over time:

• period effects;

• lifecycle effects; and

• cohort effects.

By studying how these three effects individually and collectively shape us, we can develop a powerful new understanding of how and why societies are changing, and a much greater ability to predict what comes next regarding the biggest issues of our times.

Period effects: The attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of a society can change in a consistent way across all age groups. These period effects often occur in response to a major event that affects everyone, whether directly or indirectly, such as a pandemic, war or economic crisis. When charted on graphs, they often make the pattern we see in Figure 0.1. This example measures concern about terrorism in France. Few people in any generation were worried about terrorism before 2015 and 2016, when there was a severe spike of concern following a series of attacks in which over 200 people were killed. Every generation of adults surveyed responded to this series of tragic events in the same way.

Figure 0.1: Percentage of adults in France who say terrorism is one of the most worrying issues in their country9

Lifecycle effects: People also change as they age, or as a result of major life events, such as leaving home, having children or retiring. Figure 0.2 tracks the proportion of each generation of adults in England who are classified as being a ‘healthy weight’ as they get older. You can follow your own generational line and see that, on average, people get fatter as they get older (as I’m all too aware). Each generation slowly drifts downwards, the result of too many calories and not enough exercise for their falling metabolism, until, in middle age, only around a quarter of people are still a healthy weight.

Figure 0.2: Percentage of adults in England with a healthy weight (defined as BMI score between 18.5 and 24.9)10

Cohort effects: A generation can also have different attitudes, beliefs and behaviours because they were socialized in different conditions from other generations, and thus will remain distinct from other cohorts even as they age. Figure 0.3 shows the proportion of US adults who say they attend a religious service at least weekly. The oldest generation are much more likely to attend regular religious services, with clear steps down, until we reach what looks like rock bottom with Millennials and Gen Z. And this pattern of generational gaps has not changed much, all the way back to 1975, showing how important when you were born is in shaping your relationship with religion.

Every change in societal attitudes, beliefs and behaviours can be explained by one – or, more often, a combination – of these three effects. This, therefore, highlights the basic problem with the generational ‘analysis’ in most commentary: assuming that when a person is born explains all their attitudes and behaviours relies solely on identifying cohort effects – and misses out on two-thirds of the power of this fuller understanding of societal change. This is a far more compelling and useful approach to generational thinking than the sensationalist claims that often pass for it. Once you realize that all societal change is explained by a combination of these three effects, you have a framework for a deeper understanding of where we are now and what is likely to come next. You may find yourself asking ‘Is this a cohort, period or lifecycle effect?’ about a societal change – and that simple question will help you identify what’s really important.

Figure 0.3: Percentage of adults in US attending religious services at least weekly11

Throughout the book, we’ll unpick similar trends by looking at charts like these. It has a fancy sounding name – ‘synthetic cohort analysis’ – but it is entirely intuitive. All we do is define groups according to when they were born and track their average progress as they get older. Of course, most of the patterns are not as clear-cut as in the examples above, and it is not possible to entirely unpick the three effects (cohort, lifestyle, period) in any case.12 They nearly always interact, but understanding that interaction is incredibly valuable.

In order to examine how we are changing, I have analysed some of the biggest surveys conducted in the world over the past 50 years. I’ve assembled a dataset of over 3 million interviews from these surveys, linked together to help separate the myths of generational difference from the reality. This allows us to get closer to the underlying changes occurring in societies around the world. I’ve also drawn on a series of new survey questions that were specially commissioned for this book through the global research firm Ipsos.

Before we dig in, we must first recognize some of the common misconceptions that get in the way of identifying actual change. In particular, we are often fed analysis that confuses age with generation, and which stereotypes both the old and the young.

Our generational delusions

Older people have always had a problem with the young. According to the early twentieth-century Cambridge scholar Kenneth John Freeman, the ancient philosopher Socrates indicted young people for a whole host of things, including their:

… luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders and a love for chatter in place of exercise … Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs.13

Bizarre complaints about the young didn’t start or stop in ancient Greece. In 1624, Thomas Barnes, a minister at a London church, complained that ‘the youth were never so sawcie, yea never more savagely sawcie’. In 1771, nearly 250 years before ‘snowflake’ became an attack on the young, a reader’s letter to Town and Country magazine moaned that youth were ‘a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles’. And in 1843, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury lamented in the House of Commons that ‘young ladies’ in the market town of Bilston had taken to ‘drive coal-carts, ride astride upon horses, drink, swear, fight, smoke, whistle, sing, and care for nobody’.14 Nineteenth-century Bilston sounds like an amazing place for a night out.

Young people have also always been seen as being susceptible to the latest fads and fashions, willing to discard traditional values in favour of dangerous new entertainments and technologies. In 1906 – nearly a century before violent video games – the Dawson Daily News in Yukon, north-west Canada roared: ‘BOYS ARE RUINED. Dime Novels Cause Lads to Murder.’15 Going back a little further to 1859, an article in Scientific American warned that the new craze for chess caused ‘pernicious excitement’ among children of a ‘very inferior temperament’.16

These repeated waves of moral panic provide a historical context to today’s apocryphal stories about Millennials supposedly ‘killing’ everything from wine corks to wedding rings and the Olympics to serendipity.17 In just a few short years, Millennial-bashing became an established cliché to be mocked in satirical social media posts; @NewCallieAnn tweeted, ‘I cut my finger slicing open an avocado and now I can’t fix my topknot.’18

Our relentless criticism of Millennials, and increasingly Gen Z too, is the result of a set of human biases that have nothing to do with the essential character of these generations. People tend to think the past was better than it really was because they forget the bad bits – in these cases, the dodgy behaviour of young people in their own youth. We call this bias ‘rosy retrospection’. We also struggle to keep pace with changing social norms over time, and older people look at the young through the frame of the values that held sway when they were young themselves. Societal values, beliefs and attitudes shift over time but our individual ideas of what is right or acceptable are ‘sticky’ – they stay with us – which makes emerging attitudes and behaviours seem strange and unsettling.

Older generations fare no better than younger ones in the public imagination. Psychologists have found that many Western cultures categorize older people into seven basic stereotypes, more than half of which are negative: ‘curmudgeon/shrew’, ‘severely impaired’, ‘despondent’, ‘recluse’, ‘perfect grandparent’, ‘golden ager’ and ‘John Wayne conservative’.19 When they are shown in entertainment or advertisements, older people are almost always depicted as one of those seven stereotypes, whether they are skydiving silver foxes or frail, frightened grannies holding on tightly to their stairlifts as they slowly head to bed at 8 p.m. And that’s when they appear at all – people over 60 are generally hugely underrepresented in the media, relative to their large share of the world’s population and their even greater share of its wealth.

You would think that smart ad executives would have caught on to the shifting demographics a long time ago, given the number of news analysis pieces that have been written on the subject. In fact, one Time magazine cover story noted that some ad agencies were setting up special units to study and reflect older adults as a growing consumer force. ‘There was a time when advertisers behaved as though no one past middle age ever bought anything more durable than panty hose. No more,’ the article reported.20 That story ran in 1988 – 33 years ago – yet surprisingly little has changed since then. The former CEO of a major retailer recently confessed that his company had 12 customer segments for people under 55 years old, but lumped everyone aged 55 or over into one segment.21

The main generation of older people today, the Baby Boomers, are also subject to attacks. ‘OK, Boomer,’ Gen Z’s sarcastic collective eye roll, has taken a firm hold and was even used by one young MP to dismiss a heckler during a debate about climate change in the New Zealand parliament.22 Boomers may not get quite as many scathing reviews for their behaviour as Millennials, but the ones they do receive are weighty. Forget the examples of products and traditions that Millennials have supposedly killed off, there are frequent claims that Baby Boomers have ruined everything.23 When you try that contemporary test of how society views something – typing it into Google to see what the autocomplete comes back with – Boomers don’t do so well. They are ‘the problem’, ‘selfish’, ‘self-centred’ and ‘the worst generation’.

Between today’s young and old generations is Generation X. This is where I fit in – and yes, I recognize the irony that my obsession with generations is in stark contrast with the scant attention my own generation receives these days. As one fellow Gen Xer tweeted, ‘I am neither a millennial nor a boomer. I come from a generation so irrelevant that people can’t even be bothered to hate us.’24

It all started so well. My generation got its name from Douglas Coupland’s hip 1991 novel Generation X, which followed the supposed ‘slacker’ lifestyle of the twenty-somethings of the day. Coupland took his title from a 1990 book on the American class system by the cultural critic Paul Fussell. As he dissects layer after layer of class – from ‘top out-of-sight’ to ‘mid-proletarian’ to ‘bottom out-of-sight’ – Fussell describes how some young people were trying to free themselves entirely from this rigid system: ‘Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theaters of class which enclose others.’25 Insolent, intelligent, ironic and spirited – my generation is definitely the coolest.

However, Generation X has received virtually no attention since those heady days. As one writer puts it, they’re the ‘smaller “middle child” generation’, squashed between Baby Boomers and Millennials, the two demographic and cultural heavyweights.26 The lack of limelight for Gen X has led to a sub-genre of generational commentary that resembles photobombing a family get-together you haven’t been invited to. Some of it claims that Gen X can save the world (or ‘keep everything from sucking’27), while other elements of it tip into embarrassing youth-bashing: ‘The Millennials have taken a reputational beating in the last few years, some of it gratuitous, most of it justified. They are needy nellies who can’t take a joke.’28This seems somewhat beneath a generation that takes its name from a novel in which the narrator observes, ‘The car was the color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying WE’RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE, a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours working his McJob.’ The forgotten middle child has forgotten what it felt like to be young.

Where do you fit in this generational procession? Table 0.1 outlines the most widely accepted definitions. In the US, the Pre-War generation is sometimes split into the ‘Greatest Generation’ (those born prior to 1928), and the ‘Silent Generation’ (those born between 1928 and 1945). I have grouped these together in this book, partly because the labels are generally not used outside the US, but mostly because the Greatest Generation now makes up a very small percentage of the population.

Table 0.1: Generational birth years

There isn’t complete agreement on where one generation ends and another starts, particularly around Millennials and Generation Z, where the boundaries are only just emerging. Where you place the cut-offs is, in any case, arbitrary to some degree. Those at the edges of each group will tend to share characteristics common to their birth-year neighbours, because social change tends to be gradual rather than sudden. But this doesn’t devalue generational thinking – as we will see, there are distinctive characteristics that we can identify using these classifications. And many other social classifications – like class and ethnicity – also simplify the underlying realities, yet still tell us useful things about the make up of and attitudes within society.

Some researchers are already imposing an end point on Generation Z, and starting to call the group that will come next ‘Generation Alpha’. We won’t be looking at the very youngest generation in this book – because it’s ludicrous to do so when the oldest are around ten and the youngest haven’t even been born.

This desperate attempt to label a generation that consists of young children and those who have yet to be conceived demonstrates our obsession with coining the name for a generation. The US Census Bureau almost certainly came up with the term ‘Baby Boomers’, while Douglas Coupland undoubtedly invented and popularized ‘Generation X’. William Strauss and Neil Howe are credited with coining the term ‘Millennials’, while ‘Generation Z’ follows on from the first name given to the Millennials, ‘Generation Y’. But this summary hides countless failed attempts at naming generations. ‘Generation Me’, ‘Generation We’, ‘the Net Generation’, ‘Next Boomers’, ‘Centennials’, ‘iGen’, and even ‘Generation K’ (after Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of ‘The Hunger Games’ series of novels and films), have all been tried out at one point or another.

As we may have expected, the ‘COVID Generation’ is already being used in media analysis about the predicted impact of the pandemic on the younger generation. Whether it takes hold will only become clear in the coming years, but it certainly has a more powerful claim than names based on characters from movies. I have no particular interest in the naming of generations – the real value is not the label but what the trends show us about the experiences of different groups in the past, and what they suggest about our future.

We can see the future

The generational analysis in this book is inevitably future-focused, but it does not require any spurious leaps from exaggerated differences or astrological thinking. It is built on three of the few – maybe the only – incontrovertible facts about humans: they are born, they age and they die. This is seen in each cohort’s share of the adult population over time, in Figure 0.4. In 1972, around 80 per cent of the adults in the UK were born before the end of the Second World War; now they make up just 12 per cent. It won’t be long until they are all but gone, while Gen Z makes its way into adulthood and ‘replaces’ them. There is no way to understand how society as a whole will change in the future without understanding what is really different between the generations.

Figure 0.4: Generational profile of the UK29

Some people might take issue with the idea that we can use past generational changes to predict the future. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, ‘History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps.’ He argues that we largely do not see these jumps coming. Change is instead driven by ‘black swan’ events, such as the 2008 global financial crisis, which was the focus for Taleb’s analysis, and now, even more powerfully, the COVID-19 pandemic. These events are rare, have extreme impacts and only seem predictable in retrospect, despite our tendency to believe subsequently that we knew they were coming.30

To illustrate the deep unpredictability of future outcomes, Taleb cites an example given by the mathematician Michael Berry, who looked at the challenge of predicting the movement of billiard balls on a table. It starts easily enough, but by the ninth impact, the outcome is so finely balanced that you need to account for the gravitational pull of the person standing next to the table, and by the fifty-sixth, the position of every elementary particle in the universe needs to be factored into your calculations. Given that, how could we expect to have an accurate understanding of the possible futures of complex human systems, particularly when we experience unexpected ‘black swan’ events, such as the 2008 crisis or a pandemic – the equivalent of someone coming along and upending the table?

My many years of following generational lines has left me less pessimistic about our ability to see the future. Of course, it is possible that we will suddenly stop getting more overweight as we age or that the whole of Generation Z will embrace Christianity en masse, but such things seem unlikely. Taleb recognizes that there are ‘long quiet stretches’ where sudden shocks don’t happen, and we will see plenty of those in our charts. But generational analysis also helps in understanding the impact of the unexpected: we will vividly see the different economic life courses created for younger generations by the 2008 financial crisis, for example.

Crucially, of course, understanding how period effect shocks, like the financial crisis and the pandemic, affect people is greatly enhanced by having a clear view of the slower trajectories we are already travelling along. The impact of any crisis is shaped by the context it lands in.

A generational frame helps us to understand the impact of major demographic trends too, such as our greater life expectancy and increasingly ageing societies. This is one of the most significant changes we’ve seen, and it has huge implications for how we should understand the future. In Japan, the median age (the age of the middle person, if you lined up the whole population, from young to old) was 46 in 2015, and by 2050 it will have increased to 53. This increase of seven years may not seem like a big shift, but it reflects an incredibly aged society; 33 per cent of Japan’s current population is over 60, but by 2050, 42 per cent will be.

Japan is often held up as the exemplar of the ‘greying society’, but there are even more dramatic changes coming in other countries. For example, the median age in Brazil was just 31 in 2015 but will have increased to 45 by 2050. The proportion of people in Brazil who are over 60 will rocket from just 13 per cent in 2015 to 30 per cent by 2050. The shifting age balance in our populations is not just due to increasing longevity but also the steeply falling birth rates seen around the world. A generational perspective shows that this is not a sudden change but the end of a long trend that will be incredibly difficult to shift.

I examine these trends across countries rather than focusing on a single one, because a global view is becoming increasingly important. Early twentieth-century thinkers like Mannheim tended to see generations as nationally bounded, because of the importance of shared experience in forming meaningful cohorts. But with the globalization of so many aspects of life, sociologists have recognized that generations could also be globalizing. Businesses and consumer products are now multinational by default, and new communications technologies provide many more ways to share experiences across national boundaries. Even before COVID-19, traumatic events and threats, such as the climate emergency, economic crises and the ‘war on terror’, had a more global perspective. The pandemic has again accelerated this trend, emphasizing our incredible global interconnections. At the time of writing, 213 countries or territories had reported cases of the virus, but also countries are much more closely tied together in their responses and the economic implications of their measures than in any previous pandemic.31

This is not to say that differences between countries are unimportant. ‘Country before cohort’ will still be a regular message in this book: even now, where you are born often remains more important than when. The true value of an international study of generations isn’t in proving that there are global generational groups, but in enabling us to understand when and why generational difference is important.