Loyal readers of this blog know that I’ve been combating the prevalent Madison Avenue-concocted generational model for years, along with fellow authors David Stewart and JD Cowan.
Much of our understanding of what, say a Zommer or a Millennial is comes from ad agencies who draw arbitrary lines between cohorts to help sell stuff.
And those ad hoc lines move at the big marketing firms’ whim.
Which is how we get absurdities like lumping people who grew up without internet into the same cohort as those who’ve had smartphones since childhood. You’re just not going to get useful descriptive or predictive data from that model.
One of the pop demographers’ first and biggest mistakes is starting from the assumption that a generation lasts twenty years.
If you account for not just the extent of social change, but how the rate of change has accelerated, ten-year generations make more sense from a cultural perspective.
Like most ideas that challenge the status quo, this concept has gotten no small measure of pushback.
That’s why it’s vindicating to see the great Steve Sailer reach similar conclusions independently.
With all due respect, Sailer’s main argument for ten-year generations is on the money. It’s just that the Trump-Biden dichotomy he cites undermines how he applies it.
It would be hard to pick two current politicians who are more different than Trump and Biden.
Say what you want about Trump, he’s always had a real job in the private sector. You can point to tangible stuff he’s produced.
Biden, in contrast, has been a creature of the system from the start. He’s never not subsisted on the permanent bureaucracy.
That’s not even getting into differences in attitude and temperament.
Now, it’s not that Biden’s parasitic lifestyle is definitive of the Silent Generation. He’s quite an outlier in that regard. The point is that choosing such wildly different guys as examples of the same cohort argues against that point.
Regardless, Biden is in fact a Silent, and Trump is the quintessential Boomer.
And the observed parameters of 1935-1945 for Silents and 1946-1956 for Boomers fit both of them perfectly.
That’s not to flex on Sailer. He’s doing important work challenging the dominant generational narrative.
And as folks are noticing, he and I seem to be feeling out the contours of the same elephant.
Makes you wonder how else you’ve been manipulated by the establishment marketing machine.
Learn how they’ve been lying to you – and how to reclaim your dignity.
I also think the ten year periods are right on the money. I’m an outlier myself, firmly Gen Y by age but my parents are Silents. Yet despite them not being or having many attributes of Boomers, I definitely share a lot more in common with my Gen Y group than Gen X. I use myself as an example to show how well these classifications work, and of an illustration of the forces at work in shaping each generation, how so much of it comes from the world you’re exposed to as you grow. Honestly it worries me to think that no matter what I do, my kids might inevitably come to acquire the worst vices of their generation too.
I think you can not separate the fact on how different the year 1945 was to 1946.
Having a baby in 1945 would of been still stressful since civilians (especially the women back at homeland) does not know when the war would be over, the prices are high (food and other essentials), the young Men are still overseas (leaving many without a father) and the dead bodies are coming back.
Compare to 1946, the War is over, the men are back (so kids are growing up with a father for most), the economy is growing, prices are coming down and the threat of War is probably at its lowest in history of the US until 1949.
It would be silly to think the epigenetics of both pregnant, kids and babies would not be affected by both the personal and world events in the USA. A society with women rising kids without father alone has massive effects.
Good point. Pre- and post-1946 maps to pre- and post-9/11/01.
Oh neat, a new generations post. Hope you don’t mind if I post my controversial opinion on a related subject here:
The vices of & damages caused by Boomers are many and they deserve a lot of flak in the current day for deliberately eating the seedcorn of the entire Western/First World, but claims that they were the drivers of the deleterious social engineering of the mid-20th century has always struck me as wrong-headed.
People born in the decade after WWII ended, 1945-1954, were quite simply not old enough to be civically engaged in the 1960s “counterculture”.
The absolute oldest of them might have made in to the back of the line for Woodstock and the final few post-MLK riots- sorry, “marches”- but by and large Civil Rights, 2nd Wave Feminism, Immigration Derestriction, the Hippies back when they were a semi-serious subcultural camp, all were things that they were subjected to while still kids.
It was the Silents that were the pioneers and main carriers of the dyscivic poison of the 60s, to the point that I have no idea how in hell they have managed to absolve themselves and claim they were a “traditionalist but completely marginalized cohort” when simple arithmetic with ages and dates exposes the lie.
Silents were the ones to support bussing. Baby Boomers were the high-schoolers forced to comply with it at literal gunpoint, and then just claimed it as their idea in adulthood when they got Stockholm Syndrome-d into being liberal and succumbed to their generational egomania.
Boomers still at fault for the humiliating end of the Vietnam War though, and for not fixing anything post-1970.
Those who blame all our current woes on the Boomers have little grasp of history. Most of the flak cast their way is due to their group denial of bearing any responsibility at all for the state of things, despite having been in charge for going on forty years now.
The real inflection point was when the Lost Generation gave women the vote. The real mystery is why, which we’re unlikely to know this side of glory.
I would also think anyone born before 2001 would be different to the kids born after. How much the world has change since then. The stressfulness has increase since 2001 with things like 9/11, Homeland Security Act 2002, Iraq invasion 2003, 2008 financial crisis, Obama election 2009, Catastrophic Oil Spill 2010, Syrian civil war 2011, military intervention in Libya, Snowden Reveals Secrets 2013, and Crimean Peninsula 2014.
Left alone tech changes such as Facebook 2004 and iphone 2007 having major society change.
I know the effects of Covid panic of 2020 to March 2022 is already showing to have major effects on children and babies. Learning disables have increase, social interactions problems, increase of anxiety, increase depression and problems of sleep. This alone would be bad enough but the mrna shots given out without long term studies may also have major consequences but we shall see.
That is why I start Gen Z in 2001. They are the first generation who never lived in the real America at all. And as their name suggests, they are turning out to be the last cohort with an intelligible identity according to the old generational model. The misnamed “Gen Alpha” is turning out to be something else altogether.
I had a comment written about how the “magic” number for generations is 11 years, and that if you start with boomers as 1946-1956 and proceed in 11 year intervals you get pretty defensible generation boundaries, including things like Zoomers starting after 9/11 and Gen Y going up to the end of the cold war.
Then I realized I was just rediscovering your proposed generation boundaries exactly (with the exception of the boundaries for the greatest generation; though it’s pretty easy to argue that those born in 1924-1934, and thus had their childhood formed by the great depression, are different from those who were born from 1913-1923 and so actually significant experiences pre-depression.)
In any case, if you do go by 11 year intervals things line up almost exactly with decades when talking about Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials and Zoomers. So when referring to those generations in general public it is a lot easier to just say 70’s kids, 80’s kids, etc. The mistake is extrapolating this as a general rule. Things start to break down with Gen Jones and the decade as generation doesn’t work at all for the Boomers.
I knew the way we thought about Boomers was wrong because my parents are technically considered Boomers, but while the Boomeriest Boomers were engaged in the 60s subculture, doing drugs, and showing up at Woodstock… my parents were in elementary school.