252. The Theory of Generations

Подписаться 34 тыс.

Просмотров 1,4 тыс.

50% 1

Generations are used to explain everything from the state of the economy to attitudes about sexuality, but do they really explain anything?
Additional thanks to Stefan Kehlenbach for his assistance with this episode!
- Links for the Curious -
- Millennials Don’t Exist! Adam Conover at Deep Shift , 2016) - • Millennials Don't Exis...
- Do Generations Exist? with Jean Twenge - Factually! - 219 , 2023) - • Do Generations Exist? ...
- Post-Brexit Boomer blaming: The contradictions of generational grievance (Bristow, J., 2021) - journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11...
- Open letter to the Pew Research Center on generation labels (Cohen, P. N., 2021) - familyinequality.wordpress.co...
- Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as if They Are a Thing? (Costanza, D., 2018) - slate.com/technology/2018/04/...
- 5 things to keep in mind when you hear about Gen Z, Millennials, Boomers and other generations (Dimock, M., 2023) - www.pewresearch.org/short-rea...
- Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago (Hall, S.) - www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
- The weird and disastrous rise of generational warfare (Korducki, K. M., 2023) - www.businessinsider.nl/the-we...
- The Sociological Problem of Generations (Mannheim, K., 1928) -
- It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations” (Menand, L., 2021) - www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
- Researching Homeownership Inequalities: A Life-Cycle Perspective (Moulton, S., 2022) -
- A Sociological Analysis of “OK Boomer” (Mueller, J. & McCollum, J., 2021) -
- Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation (Murdock, G. & McCron, R., 2006) -
- How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward (Parker, K., 2023) - www.pewresearch.org/short-rea...
- Influences of socioeconomic status, social network, and competence on subjective well-being in later life: A meta-analysis. (Pinquart, M. & Sörensen, S., 2000) - doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10....
- Generations and Generational Differences: Debunking Myths in Organizational Science and Practice and Paving New Paths Forward (Rudolph, C. W., Rauvola, R. S., Costanza, D. P. & Zacher, H., 2021) - link.springer.com/10.1007/s10...
- Key facts about housing affordability in the U.S. (Schaeffer, K., 2022) - www.pewresearch.org/short-rea...
- Millennials are killing the napkin industry (Schlossberg, M.) - www.businessinsider.com/mille...
- Why it’s time to ditch the ‘OK Boomer’ meme (Sunkara, B., 2019) - www.theguardian.com/commentis...
- Thinking generations (White, J., 2013) - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...
- ‘#OkBoomer, time to meet the Zoomers’: studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on TikTok (Zeng, J. & Abidin, C., 2021) - www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...
- MTV Generation xkcd.com/973/
- U.S. Homeownership Rate by Year [2024]: Facts & Figures ipropertymanagement.com/resea...
- The Emerging Crisis of Aged Homelessness: Could Housing Solutions Be Funded from Avoidance of Excess Shelter, Hospital and Nursing Home Costs? , 2019) - repository.upenn.edu/handle/2...
- Boomers are not the enemy - RU-vid , 2022) - • Boomers are not the enemy
- U.S. Homeownership Rate by Year [2024]: Facts & Figures , 2024) - ipropertymanagement.com/resea...
- Oliver (Olly) on Instagram: ‘In honor of Pride Month here’s a compilation of Mama LuLu being an LGBTQ+ ally throughout the years. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ #pride @mama.the.great’ , 2024) - / c7y6qk2pkfc

Опубликовано:

19 июн 2024

Ссылка:

Скачать:

Готовим ссылку...

Добавить в:

Мой плейлист

Посмотреть позже

Комментарии : 46

@michaelcherry8952 Месяц назад

I count as a "Boomer" (born 1960) but the thing that has always amazed me is how adaptable the generations can be. My grandparents were born in the Victorian era (1880 for my grandfather and 1888 for my grandmother) and both lived to see the moon landing in 1969. When they grew up, the major technologies were electricity and telephones and where they lived for a good part of their adult lives in Northern Alberta, they had neither. And yet, at the age of 89 and 81 respectively, they sat in front of the television watching man walk on the moon. In their younger years, both the idea of sending people to the moon and being able to see pictures at great distances were the stuff of Jules Verne fantasy. The difficulty with trying to put "generations" into neat categories is that you run into the main problem when dealing with people: we are all agents of chaos and chaos is not exactly predictable. However, even though we live in a very chaotic, analogue world, we still insist on thinking in yes/no, good/bad binary. We want instant, neat categorization and when something does not fit into the box that we have prepared for it, we get confused. "What's that you say? A Millennial with good table manners? IMPOSSIBLE!!!" Categories are useful for organizing and analyzing data, but it is a mistake to think that they are hard and fast definitions.

@undercoverduck Месяц назад

I honestly don't even know what generation I'm supposed to be a part of. Always felt like astrology but for people who are way too obsessed with age to me.

@cryptonative Месяц назад

One definition I don’t dislike is whether you grow up with/without/without-and-with social media with -> zoomer without -> gen x without-and-with -> millenial

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

"Astrology" was exactly the metaphor I used in a previous version of the script! As for social media - I don't disagree that different aged people experience it differently, but positing some insurmountable difference in the way we experience the world based on when we created our first Facebook account seems like a stretch to me.

@cryptonative 28 дней назад

@@THUNKShow It’s not social media that’s interesting per se but the option to talk to their friends at any time, the ability to acquire a following and the chance to be harassed online that I think could have a signaficant impact on an individual. I prefer “definitions” that are not based purely on age and these circumstances seem new with social media. If you have another way to describe generations and better describe inter-generetional differences I’d be curious to hear.

@Tmesis___19 20 дней назад

I watch any of your videos as soon as they come out, this is my favourite channel and somehow RU-vid fails to recommend me this video

@String.Epsilon Месяц назад

For some stuff, the strong adherents to generational cohorts also seem to forget that people can change their minds. And as you rightly pointed out their material circumstances can (and do) also change. Cohorts based on lived experience are probably much more useful in both regards. Living through a nationwide catastrophe might inspire certain ideas and behaviors, but not everyone of a generation experiences such events the same. The 9/11 thing for example: I do remember that day, but for me it was a thing that happened very far away in a place I knew basically nothing of at the time. So the emotional impact is entirely different than someone of the same as as me who lived in NYC at the time. But even within a country (or city), the same events can play out differently for people. A drought and food shortage may not inflict the same hardship of a rich industrialist who owns half the grocery stores in the city, for example.

@johnkinsey2735 29 дней назад

Dude, fantastic work, this is an amazing insight. Well done

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

🙏🙏🙏 TYVM, glad you enjoyed it!

@threethrushes Месяц назад

People who try to pigeon-hole others should be ignored. I don't identify with any race, gender, nationality, generation.

@Infantry12345 Месяц назад

I have heard this idea, that imagining generational divides is more hurtful than helpful, some years ago. Enough that I have actively scrubbed my online content from hearing people talk about it as though it were a true thing. I'm glad to hear that it's being less relied upon for studies. Thanks for this breakdown, interesting to think about this rhetorical device as a tool, and how that helps or hurts different political or click bait-y goals.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

White suggests it's useful to both left- & right-wing agendas, but in both cases says it's a neat way to talk about class without actually *mentioning* class. The clickbait thing...I believe I've made my feelings on that clear. 😅 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nwOVZgClUs8.html

@Dan-hw9iu 29 дней назад

Fun red herring: "Generational differences are less predictive of home ownership than things like class, or race..." 1. In other words, regarding class: purchasing power is predictive of...power to purchase (homes). This is almost tautological and thus misleading when used to downplay generational effects. 2. You can't dismiss one predictive factor because another one exists. Both can be valid, and they often aren't mutually exclusive. I recommend watching economics professor Scott Galloway's latest TED talk, which explores the sobering issue of generational wealth gap. It's shocking, but important to hear.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

1. "Class" is not reducible to "purchasing power," it's a group of people consciously coordinating to advance their economic interests. Homeownership is highly heritable, blocs of homeowners coordinate to prevent new development, banks & other institutions extend more financial "slack" to those who have familial & social ties to other ruling-class individuals, the "floor" for affordable housing is determined more by deliberate policy than supply/demand - these are phenomena that can't be explained by something like "Rich people can afford houses, poor people can't." 2. A predictive factor is only as useful as the interventions it facilitates. If I told you that left-handed people/soccer moms/fans of Italian food/etc. are suffering more wealth inequality now than they did 50 years ago, that gives you much less to work with than telling you "More wealth is being concentrated in fewer hands over time."

@somnambuplant 29 дней назад

i remember some meme about how generations are a distraction from working class solidarity, i think from the Citations Needed podcast

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

I've heard many good things - I'll have to check it out!

@JohnDoe-ph6if Месяц назад

As always, the problem and the solution is that we need more statistics...

@THUNKShow Месяц назад

Statistics are a useful quantitative way to tell a story - the more stats you have, the more stories you can tell, but that's not always a good thing! :P

@joeyjoejoeshabadoo1411 18 дней назад

Absolutely agree, but id posit that you can do it for any arbitrary groups, such as race, culture, sex, music, sport teams, etc...

@CamilaEspia Месяц назад

I started an appliance the second the distortion starts on your video and it made me think my phone was fried. *** Anyway. This generational framing is really insidious. I don't think it's a conspiracy of sorts by some nefarious forces, just something that opportunists latch on to, but it aligns with a lot of misreadings of history as a whole. Neanderthals and anything other than ancient sapienses were thought to be a ton of what is now understood as very crude racist caricatures, until they were instead interpreted as honored (direct) ancestors of certain modern human groups, and their image has been rehabilitated. Those ancient groups or ancient cultures and ethnicities get the same reading as generational framing, if you look at the large scale; if you look into individuals, the framing becomes intrinsic unchangeable personality traits derived from personality tests and all of this, all of it, all the misreadings of proto-sapiens, ancient cultures, preceding cultures, ethnicities, generations and personalities are nothing but horoscopes. Seriously. You were born under this sign which is good when we like it and bad when we don't AMA but it doesn't matter, all answers are the same.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

Sorry for the momentary phone-anxiety! 😅 I lay the overwhelming desire to divide all of humanity into "good people" and "bad people" (scientifically, morally, biologically, etc.) at the feet of John Calvin - he was a really confused dude, but it probably wasn't his fault.

@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns Месяц назад

I think Generationalism is thing: as a member of Gen X, as a youth I nihilistically rebelled against and tried to destroy everything every previous generation believed in. Now as an adult I feel obliged to nihilistically rebel against and destroy everything every subsequent generation believes in. As for your point on news agencies not touching wealth inequality and feeding generational differences. I would call that a red herring. Talking about solving homelessness, poverty, workers rights, low pay and so on, costs the wealthy money. Changing to liberal social issues costs the rich nothing. Free healthcare requires a massive tax hike for the wealthy, transgender rights cost them nothing. The news agencies are owned by and serve the interest of the rich. So there job is to fill their pages with liberal social issues to divert people's attention from economic reform that doesn't serve the rich's interest.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

Absolutely bang on the money. Red herrings abound, & we're encouraged to view the world thru them at every turn.

@bthomson 12 часов назад

So very sorry to hear about the loss of your stuff! Hope the insurance does what it should? Also hope your belief in human nature is not dinged? Best!😎

@undercoverduck Месяц назад

Generationalism, or as the youths like to call it: how to get your confounding factor published

@Xob_Driesestig Месяц назад

7:41 Is this reacting to BritMonkey's ''Britain is a dump'' video? (For those that don't want to watch his whole video, skip to the "No country for young men" section) I do think that class is a much much more important framing than age, and his video veers into rhetoric more than analysis in a lot of places. However, I do think a couple of the policies he pointed out are clear examples of older people being privileged (in some aspects), and his hypothesis that this is for political reasons does seem plausible (especially for the one where he provides a clip of a conservative MP bragging about it to an audience).

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

I wasn't responding to BritMonkey specifically, but I'll be sure to check the video out. FWIW I don't think privileging certain demographics is incompatible with the idea that the primary antagonism is class-based - pouring fuel on culture war stuff is part of the dance!

@Xob_Driesestig 28 дней назад

@@THUNKShow It's basically a long plea to his viewers not to vote for the Conservatives in the upcoming UK elections. Just one and a half hours of listing every little thing the conservatives ruined. I am thoroughly convinced (not that I needed it), but I also can't vote there, so perhaps we're not the primary audience.

@YT-Lucas Месяц назад

6:25 - ok, chillax, ace.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

Look if I can't use all the fun new toys in DaVinci Resolve, why would I have spent days teaching myself how to use new editing software?!

@bthomson 26 дней назад

So cute when you get snippy!

@EricaCalman Месяц назад

It's a pet peeve but I am endlessly bothered by the inconsistent boundaries for generations, even to the extent they make sense at all. Like the reason "boomers" are a thing is because birth rates went up after WWII and then down around 1965, a nice 20 year block. Birth rates also went back up around 1985, again a nice even 20 year block that also corresponds to birth rates. For some reason though, people want to define millennial at 1980-1995, a 15 year block that straddles birth rates at random. It gets even worse with Z and alpha. By my definitions zoomers are 2005-2025 and alpha hasn't even started but people have all sorts of definitions that make absolutely no sense, not to mention none of the definitions are that consistent. To the extent any group identity defines anything its class not age.

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

My wife got really tired of me ranting about how the age ranges aren't even consistent - 16 years, 17 years, 19 years, *what are we even doing?*

@landspide 29 дней назад

Revolutions and Ages are more sticky...

@THUNKShow 28 дней назад

Ages certainly are sticky - I've got 37 of 'em on me, & I haven't been able to shed one yet.

@bthomson 26 дней назад

Whippersnapper!

@AgeofCraccadilliaassent 18 дней назад

I feel its llike our overlords catorgorizing us like cattle or something

@bthomson 13 дней назад

I don't have an overlord ( or I'm delusional?)

@TrumpetBoredom 29 дней назад

“Open a new tab” pffft, okay Boomer I’m watching this on my phone.

@bthomson 26 дней назад

The older you are the more of everything you STILL have to use! My mom used a mimeograph machine to run off church bulletins well into the '90s! We still need to drive standard shift just in case!

@bthomson 25 дней назад

Of course some would always CHOSE a standard! Nuts!!