I’m fascinated by how people have this tendency to speak in generational terms. They speak about how “a generation” was “the greatest” or “the lost” or with other metaphors that suggest that these generations – huge collections of unrelated individuals – somehow are thought to have acted as a whole.
I think that this is silly. Generations are not created because some mystical spirit has taken hold of a few million people and guided their every action. Generations exist because the people born at a certain time and in a certain place share some experiences using the same technologies. Zeitgeist is the environment projected upon humanity.
At the moment, there’s a ton of angst about our economic slump and in such times, simmering generational rhetoric rises to a boil. This rhetoric is almost always aimed at the generation just emerging from college, the age when an individual is expected to make the transition from irresponsible youth to fully-responsible adulthood. The rhetoric cries out that the new generation is ill equipped to handle the problems of the age and that the new generation doesn’t appreciate what has been handed to them.
You can see this in the present, as the NYT publishes an essay called What Is It About 20-Somethings?. You can see it almost twenty years ago when the Atlantic publishes an article called The Lost Generation to compare Generation X to the Lost Gen. The best example, however, is 90 years old and is titled “‘These Wild Young People’, By One Of Them”, written by John F. Carter. I’ve mentioned Carter’s article in the past and it’s one of my all-time favorites because it captures the entire generational falsehood with one of the best paragraphs of all time:
In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, ‘way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. “So simple that a child can run it!” But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages. Now, with loving pride, they turn over their wreck to us; and, since we are not properly overwhelmed with loving gratitude, shake their heads and sigh, “Dear! dear! We were so much better-mannered than these wild young people. But then we had the advantages of a good, strict, old-fashioned bringing-up!” How intensely human these oldsters are, after all, and how fallible! How they always blame us for not following precisely in their eminently correct footsteps!
Now, if you have the stomach for it, you can read an article by Peggy Noonan that laments how this world is crashing to an end and that our youth are all doomed and today’s politicians ignore this at their peril. She’s recently written a few essays that follow this line, lamenting how un-American it is that things might not go well, implying that it’s because people are getting weak or generations are doing this-or-that-fid-diddly-other-thing. To illustrate, here’s a fun quote from her:
The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.
Actually, I’ve read Booth Tarkington and it’s quaint stuff he wrote. It’s folksy Americana. Interestingly, Tarkington’s from the very generation that John F. Carter criticized in his article……you know, the generation that Carter calls out for handing over a Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up. You might even think, after reading an article by a Boomer journalist about how young’uns are losers while giving young folk a world complicated by the results of twenty years of Boomer leadership resulting in war, economic collapse, endless political hysteria in the media and environmental disasters both natural and human-made…well…there’s that little thought to consider as you digest Noonan’s ideas and ask yourself if this is really something new or unique when compared to the days of Booth Tarkington and John F. Carter.
But really, we all know that this stuff isn’t new and it’s certainly been discussed in great detail in very recent years (at least, recent in generational terms). In fact, it’s so not-new that it supports my argument that this isn’t really about actual generations but the perception of “generations” is just a symptom of shared experience.
In the 1990′s, books like 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? and The Fourth Turning, discussed the fact that history repeats itself (or, at least, rhymes) and that we shouldn’t be shocked if things don’t all go so well. In fact, we should expect it.
After all, on a long enough timeline, everybody’s mortality rate goes to 100% and Great Depressions are inevitable. If you read those books 15 years ago, you got a glimpse of something frighteningly close to what is happening today. You could be humming along with the rhyme that is the present.
In the same vein, I head back to The Atlantic, to The Lost Generation article mentioned a few paragraphs ago, there is a quote that seems relevant to today’s political climate and to what we call Generation X.
Later on, after the Lost entered midlife with a crash (the Great Depression), they changed character completely. In families they joined their elders in protecting children almost to the point of suffocation. In the media they were the Irving Berlins and Frank Capras who pushed the culture back to practicality and community.
In politics they turned isolationist and conservative, becoming the Liberty Leaguers and Martin, Barton, and Fish types whom FDR and his white-haired Cabinet blamed for impeding many New Deal crusades. Their two Presidents (Ike and Truman) were get-it-done old warriors, known more for personality than candlepower. At the peak of their earning years they tolerated a crushing 91 percent marginal income-tax rate to support the Marshall Plan for world peace and the GI Bill for a younger generation of veterans. As elders, they took pride in having ushered in the prosperous “American High,” even while younger people accused them of being cynical, rock-ribbed reactionaries. Back in the 1950s and 1960s America’s old people were extremely poor relative to the young, yet repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to cut their benefits.
Let’s see – protecting children to the point of suffocation? Check! Isolationism? Check! We’ve got two going and, I’d suspect, we’ll see more of this as the Generation X folks get older.
Granted, this article was really comparing The Lost generation to Generation X, but what it shows is that history really does rhyme and that generations are not created by some internally generated force but are shaped by the environment that surrounds them. Oh, and keep that last line in mind about “promised to cut their benefits”…
Why? Well, I think all of this suggests that we have some good ideas about what to expect from this world and what our shape we can expect from our varying “generations”. Part of it, for Generation X, was described back there under the article comparing GenX to The Lost. For Generation Y, I think we can look at what happened in Japan in the 1990′s as described in histories of the Japanese economic and banking failures. Two books in this genre are Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection or Japan’s Financial Crisis and Its Parallels to U.S. Experience (Special Reports (Institute for International Economics (U.S.)), 13.).
Note the title of the first and how it aligns with the article about how two generations in two countries voted themselves out of benefits (or, at least, didn’t struggle as it happened). Also note that the title of the secon book is about the comparison between Japan and the U.S. is about the U.S. savings and loan crisis….NOT our current crisis! Huzzah for rhyming twice in 20 years!
Hold on! Rather than suggest you go read books that are very dry, even for my palette, you can really just read news quotes like this one, published last week in the WSJ. The quote explains what a new 20-something graduate can expect in the coming…decade? Maybe lifetime?
In short, luck matters. The damage can linger up to 15 years, says Lisa Kahn, a Yale School of Management economist. She used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government data base, to track wages of white men who graduated before, during and after the deep 1980s recession.
Ms. Kahn found that for each percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, those with the misfortune to graduate during the recession earned 7% to 8% less in their first year out than comparable workers who graduated in better times. The effect persisted over many years, with recession-era grads earning 4% to 5% less by their 12th year out of college, and 2% less by their 18th year out.
For example, a man who graduated in December 1982 when unemployment was at 10.8% made, on average, 23% less his first year out of college and 6.6% less 18 years out than one who graduated in May 1981 when the unemployment rate was 7.5%. For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period.
The impact on wages could be just as severe this time around, says Ms. Kahn. That’s because of the depth of this recession and the possibility that the unemployment rate may approach the 10.8% level not seen since the early 1980s. The rate hit 8.9% in April, the Labor Department reported Friday.
So: generations as some mystical spirit that fills a people? Hardly. A rhyme that we can follow and even anticipate? Absolutely.
And a random question, as I trail off: If I’m in Generation X and many of you are in Generation Y…and I’d assume Generation Z comes next…what letter comes after Z?
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