Also check out the 1991 book Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
In their model, American history can be explained through the lens of four generational archetypes ranging from the heroic and sacrificial civilization-savers to more indulgent, rebellious, and tear-it-all-down generations. Boomers rebelled against the strict hierarchies, rules, roles, and collectivist norms instituted by their parents' generation to get though the hard times of depression and war. GenX doubled down with cynicism and distrust of institutions, and even greater individualism. Through the Strauss and Howe lens, we're now (80 years or 4 generations past the end of WW2) probably close to peak individualistic indulgence and a full teardown of the post WW2 order, lining ourselves up for the next period of crisis in which a generation (Alpha?) will have to sacrifice and work collectively to struggle through.
Strauss and Howe trace the same pattern back through earlier 4-generation cycles. For example, the Revolution and the Civil War were won by heroic generational archetypes, four generations apart and also four generations from WW2.
That’s an interesting approach to looking at the timeline. With multiple generations in play at once all the time and with people changing their attitudes as they age I wonder how they’d square that with the challenging history the country’s lived through:
400 years of slavery with another 100 years of forced segregation during Jim Crow
Genocide of the native Indian population
The Civil War
The 1st and 2nd industrial revolutions
The 1950s Deportation of more than a million “wetbacks” including thousands of US citizens
The 70 years fight for women’s sufferage
The 1st and 2nd Red Scares (reaction to the Bolsheviks in the early 1900s and McCarthyism in the ‘50s)
The World Wars
The incarceration of Japanese citizens in internment camps
The Cold War and global American Age—including the overthrow of legitimate governments throughout the world
The “War on Drugs”, as we increased the number of imprisoned Americans (mostly black/hispanic) 7X
The Generational (20 years) War in the Middle East
Sometimes I think the “generations” have some years of potential influence…some opportunity to make their mark…and then just slip into the broader tapestry with the rest of the living.
The concept of "generations" in the sense of a number of consecutive age cohorts temporally constrained by exposure to historical events of various duration isn't really useful.
In the first step, the frequencies of certain beliefs is empirically determined in age cohorts corresponding to time periods determined by historical exposures and the term "generation" designates that thus created group of consecutive age cohorts.
Obviously, the proposition that a particular sequence of cohorts represents a "generation" is simply a tautology that is always true and therefore carries high impact in terms of plausibility (like the tautology 2+2=4) unless the circularity is recognized.
In the second step, the concept of "generation" is expanded beyond the circular definition with empirical research investigating group beliefs that were not part of the initial defining set of beliefs.
Of course, there will always be a good number of beliefs that are covariant with the original beliefs that lend more plausibility to the idea that "generations" are a thing if the covariance is not recognized (extremely common error).
This sets the stage for the next step in which the set of beliefs that have been found to differentiate the initial group of cohorts from other groups and the newly found (often covariant) beliefs.
This combined set of beliefs is then declared to be a differentiating characteristic of the "generation" in question and that remains stable over time.
In the fourth step, the set of beliefs that have now taken on a sense of immutability through time. This represents the step in which reification takes place which in turn satisfies the desire for constancy that imbues the concept with heightened plausibility again.
There is much more to be said but it should become clear that "generation" is not logically defensible concept and scientifically useless as any attempt to map the "generations" back to to the historical events that were used to determine the group of cohorts the "generation" consists of is again circular.
From all this, an avalanche of junk science and other nonsense can be created to feed the publication machine and to keep ignorant journalists and politicians happy - and all that keeps going of because tautologies come with this heightened sense of plausibility because they are always true in isolation (emotional reasoning is what is exploited here).
So it won't square because it is circular at heart (pun intended), and contains the error of immutability of beliefs and attitudes over time, making these characteristics appear to be an essential feature of the personalities of the people exposed to certain historical events/periods (there are echoes of the fundamental attribution error here).
I like that the authors of the article quote Leibniz, the philosopher and mathematician who was a co-creator of calculus.
I think it is meant as a stab at the combination of an unshakeable but flawed belief in frequentist statistics combined with ignorance of basic logic that keeps this kind of thing going with no end in sight - fundamentally, describing reality as step functions instead of additive infinitesimally small changes over time:
Natura non facit saltus (nature does not make leaps) Leibniz, New Essays (IV, 16).
Abstract
The concepts of generations and generational differences have received much attention in the academic literature, in the popular press, and among practitioners, policymakers, and politicians. Despite the continued interest, research has failed to find convincing evidence for the existence of distinct generations, commonly conceptualized as broad groupings of birth cohorts (e.g., 1980–2000) that have been influenced by a set of significant events (e.g., economic depressions) and labeled with names and qualities that supposedly reflect their defining characteristics (e.g., Millennials). Further, any differences that have been found in empirical studies, and that have been attributed to generational membership, are more likely due to age and/or contemporaneous period effects. Nonetheless, some researchers, employers, institutions, governments, and many laypeople continue to treat generations like they are a powerful and actionable phenomenon.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691823002354
