10-04-2016, 12:04 PM
(10-03-2016, 06:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote:Warren Dew Wrote:To me, a narrow duration of the imprinting phase of life seems implausible: people get married at widely differing ages; people have their first children at widely differing ages; people shift from education to work over a broad band of ages. Why would generational imprinting happen in a narrow band of ages, in contrast to all of those?
The concept I am using comes from political science and deals with the acquisition of a political paradigm (worldview) that guides how one sees the political and socioeconomic issues. An assumption is history is largely made by politically active people (minimally those that vote). People generally start to think about voting as they reach the age of suffrage. Unlike the things you mentioned, developing a political opinion is pretty effortless, and should happen pretty quickly after one first starts voting. So you would expect political paradigms to form over a fairly short time. A lot of research shows that political ideas, once formed, are quite resistant to the later additional information. In fact, contrary information often strengthens the prior belief. So one formed, these paradigms would be durable and held long after they may no longer be applicable.
That concept probably has some validity for politics, at least for party loyalty, though I still think it takes a few years: how easy it was to get a first job and how good the job was seems to form a big part of the opinion of the Presidential party in power. Of course, having an opinion on a party based on one president is a pretty shallow form of politics given how far presidents can diverge from their party mainstream.
I'm not sure how well this works for generations. The idea that the Silent/Boomer boundary is based on whether WWII is remembered or just history seems very strong to me. Similarly the GI/Silent boundary being based on stage of life during the war seems much stronger than anything else that could bind the Silents together. One of my mother's earliest memories is of being told to hide under a bed during a bombing at age 4; then she spent the rest of her childhood as a refugee. That has to be very different from someone who was in an earlier generation and played a part in determining the war's outcome, or in a later generation who doesn't have a personal feel for the war being a big deal.
The war can't by itself account for the Boomer/X or X/Millenial transitions, of course.
(10-03-2016, 06:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote:Warren Dew Wrote:Temporally narrow social moments seem more plausible. Certainly the crisis wars don't tend to last more than a few years.
The problem with narrow social moments that I see is the phase of life. People do not, as a rule, go through life roles in lockstep. You are a perfect example. You have children around the age of my grandchildren. I started in my field 35 years ago, and am nearing retirement. You began in your current field much more recently. In many ways you are a phase of life behind me and so would be a late wave Gen Xer* with the narrow social moment. But with the narrow political-paradigm imprinting period we would be in the same generation, late-wave Boomers.
*If we have a crisis war in the next few years that sets us in our generations, the role I will play is an elder one—making me a Boomer, while you will play a mature adult role and so become a GenXer.
While I agree that there's likely more dispersion in age at first child than in age at first vote, at least for men, I think I'm very unusual in being 48 when my first child was born.
Are you arguing that there's very little dispersion in when the political paradigm "flips"? What do you see as the defining moments of change since WWII?
