Millennials and GenZ horribly misidentified

[fran22d]

(04-28-2019, 09:59 PM)NobodyImportant Wrote: I don't know whether it's because of the authors' scarce reliance on actually good data, or because they ... quite literally are out of touch boomers, but the brackets to put these generations into are nonsense.

Although you didn't phrase your critique politely, I think you make a valid point: the more recent generations, as defined by Strauss–Howe, don't seem to align with reality. To be fair, they wrote Generations back in 1991, so this was all projection (guesswork) at the time. The true definition of each generation can only be provided in retrospect.

That said, I think they made a fundamental error when they defined the Baby Boom Generation, and the consequences have cascaded down to our day. As you asserted Strauss and Howe are baby boomers themselves, and they seem to have fallen victim to the boomer trope that the Kennedy assassination marked the end of an era. Being a boomer myself, I can vouch for the huge shadow it cast for us. But society didn't change fundamentally as a result. Life went on more or less as before, and the demarcation between pre- and post-Kennedy assassination eras amounted to a distinction without a difference.

The defining characteristic Baby Boom Generation is in the name: baby boom. Looking at a birth rate chart (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers) you can see a very obvious spike in the years following WW-II that declines over time. Although the beginning of this period is fairly obvious, the end of this generation and the beginning of the next is far less so. The United States Census Bureau defines it as 1946-1964, but one could just as easily push the ending year out to 1970 or beyond. (The birth rate didn't bottom out until the mid-70s.) And once the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers are no longer classified as Generation X, the latter group absorbs most of what we've traditionally defined as Millennial.

Cutting to the chase: I think the generations from the Baby Boomers onward need to be redefined, and here's my stab at it:

Generation Strauss–Howe Alternative
Baby Boom 1943–1960 1946–1970
Generation X 1961–1981 1971–1995
Millennial 1982–2004 1996–?

I think this aligns more closely to what we've seen over the almost three decades since the original publication of Generations.