Generational generalisations
Liam and Arleeshar have created a dilemma: while I love the idea of attending a Stoush get-together, I’ve thus far tended to avoid much exposure to discussions on Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z or whatever they’ll be calling my children. (As an excel junkie, I suggest Gen AA.)
The first thing that makes me suspicious of these labels is that no-one can ever tell me which one I’m in. (According to Wikipedia, Gen X ends in 1981, and Gen Y starts in 1977, and I was born in 1979.) I seem to flick between generations, depending on who the speaker is, and what they’re trying to prove.
Then there’s the fact that I mostly hear these generational generalisations trotted out by marketing or management types. Apparently baby boomers respect managers because they respond to hierarchies, while Gen X employees will respect a manager they perceive as competent. And Gen Y, well, they don’t want to commit to a job or a hierarchy, but see it all as a life-style decision. Really?
While digging around in the empirical literature on life cycle savings patterns recently, I came across a concept that clarifies my objection. It can be hard to identify the life-cycle pattern of savings in cross-sectional data, because other factors are at work. The asset holdings by an individual of age a in time period t will reflect an age effect, time-period specific effect and a cohort effect for those born in the period t - a. The age effect reflects the point reached in the individual’s life cycle; you save during your working life, in order to spend in retirement. The time effect is the impact of the particular period when the survey is taken. Savings might be higher for all age groups, for example, following a period of favourable stock market returns. Finally, the cohort effect is related to a person’s date of birth. For example, cohorts who lived during the Great Depression may have lower life-time earnings, and so lower savings at all ages.
So why did I bore you with all of that? Well, it seems to me that a lot of the generalisations we hear about a particular “generation” purport to be observations about the characteristics of the cohort (t – a), which allow us to gain insights into how this group will behave in the future. But can we really do that? The behaviour we observe of a particular “generation” now may be a function of a time effect, an age effect and a cohort effect. Are gen Y really bored and keen to change jobs at the drop of a hat, or is it just that they’re all in their early 20s at the moment (a), and have grown up in a part-time and deregulated workplace (t) which has influenced their views on the nature of employment? And if I can’t separate the behaviour that makes them gen Y from the time and age effects, how do I have any idea of what they’ll be like in the future?
It all just seems like a thrown together make-a-quick-buck-and-book-deal analysis of evidence that by its very nature is incomplete. Perhaps we could all get more insight out of reading horoscopes.
PS. See you all on the 28th anyway…
liam wrote:
Good post Emmeline.
I tend to agree entirely about generational analyses though I don’t think the demographic algebra is necessary. From a social science or historical perspective, age is one of the least important of the possible collective identifications available to groups of humans.
It’s necessarily temporary, and is far less important than the kinds of things people have far more difficulty changing: place of birth, gender, nationality, religious upringing, race, and so on.
This is the reason, for example, why campaigns for votes-for-under-18s have never taken off in the same way that universal franchise campaigns used to: young people know that their condition is one they’re going to grow out of.
arleeshar wrote:
in light of your comment, liam, it’s interesting to think about the success of the television show ‘Sex in the City’ which is widely attributed to its capturing a particular social situation which seems to be largely based around age+gender-based identification. In which the protagonists seem to be coming to terms with the removal of their age-based identity as young women. Wherein their nationality/race/social caste are invisibly centred eastcoastamerican/white/uppermiddleclass and thus not the subject of analysis in the same way as gendered age issues are. Wherein the central issue is that the protagonists will in fact ‘grow out of’ this particular age-based identification which so shapes their social interactions and bodily hexis, and the characters are bonded together in a kind of age-based class by their ways of coping with the fear of that eventuality.
liam wrote:
Oh, and I’ve always liked the idea of either Generations α, β and γ through ω, or Generation X, Generation X1, Generation X2, etc…
frankenreagan wrote:
Interesting post. I’ve had my own criticisms of the Gen Y literature, but never thought of doing an algebraic analysis (comes with being a sociologist rather than an economist).
You picked up my pet hate about these books, namely, the myth that young people prefer to change jobs regularly. I don’t recall ever being given a choice about this. Many of the jobs I’ve had have been temporary or casual (at to begin with), and I think that’s pretty typical of this generation (nb I was born in 1981, so I guess I’m in the brink of Gens X and Y).
I put it that if members of this subject generation were given the same lifestyle as their Boomer/sub-Boomer parents (eg secure work, affordable [relative to today] housing), many would gladly take it. Instead we’ve grown up into an environment of low job stability and high mobility, whether we like it or not. The fact that some young people have the self-promotion skills to take advantage of this ‘brave new world’ shouldn’t be taken as positive proof that its a genuine choice. Authors of these books shouldn’t come to such easy conclusions.
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