A few weeks ago Ferrebeekeeper featured an introductory post concerning the power which population demographics exert over the affairs of people and nations. I would like to follow up on those ideas with a post concerning demographic cohorts in the United States (and in Western Europe, where history and shared culture have produced similar chronological categories). A cohort consists of a group of contemporaries, born together in a 15-25 year period, who have shared certain coming-of-age experiences and crises together. According to conventional thinking there are seven age-based cohorts still marching in the great parade of life here in the western democracies:
- The Lost Generation (born 1883 to 1900): Honestly only a few last representatives of the World War I generation remain alive, and they are now so old as to seem fabulously unbelievable–like unicorns or manticores. They earned their name in a horrible way. A whole generation of young men were conscripted to fight in the trenches of France–and they never came back from the mud beneath the big guns. Even in America, which entered the war late, a huge part of this generation was lost to Spanish flu. The last man to fight in the trenches died earlier this year. Soon everyone who ever lived in the shadow of the monstrous debacle that was World War I will be dead and the generation will truly be lost–but for now a few ancient grandmothers still survive.
- The Greatest Generation (born 1901 to 1924): This generation also came by its name through fighting in a World War. The abject awfulness of the Nazi and Japanese war machines gave Allied soldiers a moral clarity and purpose which other generations have lacked. Also this generation first mastered the atom, first ventured into space, and then presided over a time of unprecedented plenty and economic success.
- The Silent Generation (born 1924-1945): The oldest members of the Silent Generation participated in World War II along with the greatest generation and now pretend to be part of that cohort, but largely this was the generation slightly too young to go to war. They grew up in the depression–and they carry some of the hardheaded skinflint pragmatism of that time with them always.
- The Baby Boom (born 1945-1965): When the Second World War was won, the world lay in smoking ruins–except for America which was at the peak of its productive capacity. The brave soldiers came home, started businesses, and married the strong capable women working in the hospitals and factories. Then together they engendered a huge demographic bulge of newborns. The demographic weight of the boomers (combined with a certain self-absorbed focus on their special destiny) has put them much in the center of national affairs. They were the hippy generation who protested during the summer of love. They were the hard-charging yuppies of the eighties. They are the bulk of the government now. However the boomers are beginning to retire and this massive flux is going to upend everything in our nation.
- Generation X (born 1965-1981): Also called the thirteenth generation, this is my generation. We were born in the post-sixties hangover, when recession and malaise stalked the nation and then we came of age in the booming eighties and nineties as communication technology underwent unprecedented breakthroughs (and brought an unprecedented boom in productivity). My generation has always seemed a bit lost—a rain shadow cast by the demographic mountain of baby boomers. The conventional wisdom is that generation x is lackadaisical, cynical, and apathetic. We certainly do not have any moon landings or atomic bombs to our credit but we did have a hand in creating the new information age. Also our entire generational ethos has not been finalized. Our greatest masterpieces have not yet been painted.
- The Millennial Generation (born 1981-2002): This group is also known as the shadow boom or mini-boom because they are the children of baby boomers (and therefor have their own demographic power). The majority of our active duty service members are from this generation. They grew up surrounded by pagers, faxes, emails, and texts and they have the mentality to make sense of our networked world. When I was visiting my alma-mater a few years ago, I noticed that the students looked a lot happier and better-dressed than they did when I was a student. The bars and bathrooms were not covered in graffiti and everyone’s hair was neat. I think this generation really does have a different and more optimistic mentality then the two preceding it. Coming into the workforce during a crippling recession might jar the polite businesslike smiles of the millennial generation a bit, but based on their battlefield aplomb and their personal rectitude, we can expect great things.
- The New As-Yet-Unnamed Generation (2002-present): No golden-tongued wag has yet given a name to the generation who are currently children. Whenever I see this group featured in the mainstream media, it seems to be a pejorative article about how video games and environmental mercury are making them dull, but on an anecdotal level I have not found this to be true at all. The children I have met have all the grace, swiftness, brilliance, and innocence of children. They are bright and shiny as new-struck coins and I think it is appropriate that nobody has given them a name yet.
Of this list, I obviously have a preference for the first two generations and the last two generations. The lost generation and the greatest generation were badasses who came of age killing Germans with bayonets while building superweapons at home. The two most recent generations are good-looking kids who are polite, hard-working, socially conscious, and still possess nimble minds. Naysayers who complain about the bad pop music and bad attitudes of “kids these days” are out-of-touch curmudgeons who are not paying close attention to reality [well, popular music actually is pretty bad—ed.]. The millennials are alright and the unnamed generation are better than alright—they are adorable kids who could grow up to be anything.
Sadly, the three generations in the middle—the generations who are at their economic peak and are running the country–are a greedy, fumbling mess. It is popular to blame Chinese manufacturers, world trade, and globalization for the current economic turmoil, but there is a simpler reason for these bad times. The inability of government to work and the excesses of our financial sector reflect a deeper division in our society. A huge number of Americans are beginning to retire, and, as large swaths of the population change from productive members of society to retired (but politically active and materially successful) seniors, the nation’s economic timbre is sure to be diminished.
A quick look at the halls of congress or the directorship of large companies will reveal that the silent generation and the baby boomers may be retiring, but they have not given up the true reigns of authority. The great political movements of the past few years—the tea party and the “occupy Wall Street” protests snap into a much sharper focus if you look at the age of the respective participants. Wrestling control of the faltering nation from the hands of hard-bitten silent generation plutocrats and from a huge number of retiring boomers (who have always had things their way) falls to the indolent hands of generation x—people who would rather write blogs or paint weird paintings. I, for one, am looking forward to when the millennial generation can also rise to the halls of power. I also worry that demographic stalemate might mean we have to wait until then to enjoy a united and prosperous nation.
ferrebeekeeper 
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October 19, 2011 at 6:45 PM
Mike
Isn’t making generalizations about vast swaths of the population that happened to be born between arbitrary years a rather unsound method of accurately describing our species? Without much effort, I can think of members of each of those generations who seem to have much more in common with the descriptions of other generations than the one that is supposedly of them.
The whole idea seems about as silly as thinking people born during the same thirty day period are similar to the point that they all deserve to be lumped together under the heading Gemini or Cancer. There’s far more variety in individuals than that.
October 19, 2011 at 7:50 PM
Hieronymo
Making generalizations is what history is. How else could one begin to discuss the intricate complexities of millions—or hundreds of millions–of human lives? And it should be obvious that generations do change over time—otherwise we would think and act the same as colonial Americans. While there are always individual oddballs and standouts (as I’m sure we both know!), groups of people born in the same era broadly share educational backgrounds, moral norms, language, popular culture references, and common experiences. In some circumstances a difference between generations is more profound than a difference between nationalities—and very few would argue that China and Paraguay are the same and not subject to a demographer’s generalizations.
In terms of the larger gist of your critique though, these cohorts are indeed subject to reassessment and reorganization. Learned professors are always quibbling about arguments like whether the Renaissance is a meaningful category or whether it should be broken up into “late Medieval” and “early modern.” The cohorts here are subject to the same sort of quibbling. The categories above are how most marketers, journalists, and contemporary historians divide up age divisions but I’m sure there are dissenters (or you could make up your own).
And yes I agree with you that thirty days (or one year) is too narrow a time gage with which to divide cohorts. I think that two decades however does provide a useful break–although I had an interesting argument with somebody born in 1981 who thought the break-off years should be chosen differently.
October 20, 2011 at 10:21 AM
Mike D.
Making generalizations is what simplistic history is. Events and individuals are what history is. Learned professors can be morons, and quibbling over those definitions is just counting dancing angels on pinheads. Don’t even get me started on the validity of statements made by marketers, journalists, and contemporary historians.
That said, geographic differences seem to matter far more than temporal ones. People in New York now strike me as much more similar to New Yorkers of the 1980s than they do to people in Arkansas, Hawaii, or Idaho.
And even those similarities are imperfect — you could say 60% of NYC folks have characteristics A, B, and C, but only some have D. 20% of Idaho people have A, B, and C, but the A, D, and E combination in Idaho is nearly as frequent as in NYC. All such trends are about picking some characteristics and ignoring others to make simplistic trends that look completely different to people using different arbitrary criteria.
October 20, 2011 at 11:56 AM
Hieronymo
Individual human behavior is ridiculously complex and depends on an imponderable whirlwind of factors which change daily from person to person (and from region to region). Creating any sort of coherent narrative out of such a huge mad jumble requires inferring larger trends from an overview of the specifics. That is why we have categories like “Victorian” or “Carolingian” which obviously do not perfectly apply to every knight, strumpet, oaf, or philosopher of those eras but do represent a larger zeitgeist. Such categories are needed: otherwise history would read like “Ulysses” (except a billion times over) and nobody could figure anything out. “Quibbling over the definitions” of such categories is therefore tantamount to contending over the stories and meanings which make up the past.
But you raise valid criticisms about historiography and I enjoyed your swipe at marketers.
October 20, 2011 at 6:28 PM
Mike
What if all historical narratives are simply people trying to justify their own beliefs rather than having anything to do with how most of humanity was behaving at any given time? What if categories like Vicky and Carol don’t represent anything more than what a bunch of academics agreed the story should be so that they’d all be shown more respect than they deserve just for knowing about such things? What if all the stories and meanings that are argued about don’t actually make up the past and are instead just a big load of crap referring to nothing real? What if history is just marketing for a worldview?
October 21, 2011 at 10:10 AM
Hieronymo
Facts about events and individuals become as slippery as categories and labels. I remember my historiography class where all of the American history students were asserting that they could pin history down and understand the true nature of past events if they could just read all of the sources and see all the ledgers. I was studying Merovingian history at the time and only a handful of primary sources exist at all—and they involve demons jumping out of people’s heads and similar supernatural events which make the modern reader uneasy about their reliability. Should we therefore assert we can know nothing about Merovingians? No. We know they are incredibly distinct from the Carolingians who followed them–and both are very different indeed from the Victorians. Just invite all three groups to a genteel tea party and you’ll quickly see what I mean.
So too with the cohorts above: even if an age group consists of individuals with no shared traits/tastes/morals or what have you (which is not true) they are still different from people of a different age because they are a different age. Invite the Victorians and Generation X to your tea party and see who shows up. The living ones are Generation X. It is difficult and imperfect to pin generalizations on groups but it is not useless or dishonest.
October 25, 2011 at 8:24 PM
jenny
I’ve thought a lot about this. The tone especially. Good writing.