Data Proves Millennials Are the Worst Fake Generation

I don’t really have a quantitative comparison of bad-fakeness, but this “generation” doesn’t work.

Follow the generations tag here.

Lots of things are correlated with “generation” labels and indicators, because they’re correlated with time, and change happens over time. So it proves nothing about the validity of generation categories to observe that one generation differs from another. The question for the categories is whether the birth cohorts should be grouped in this way — which is the question generation-purveyors rarely if ever answer.

“Millennials,” those born 1980-1996 or so are clearly problematic as a category because of when major world events intervened in their lives — period effects, that is. Most notably, they ranged from age 5 to 21 on September 11, 2001; and they were age 8 to 28 when the “Great Recession” arrived. There is no way you would look at history and decide this was a logical group to bin together for analyzing social change.

Here is some more evidence.

Maybe the most extreme contrast between those born around 1980 and those born a generation later is birth rates. Here are the annual birth rates rates, by age, for women born from 1980 to 1999, now updated through 2021. The birth rate for 18-year-olds fell 65% over this period; it fell 43% for 22-year-olds. In terms of childbearing, these are different worlds.

What about attitudes and other life experiences? There’s been more confusing than usual over the question of whether “Millennials” have moved to the right politically as they age (here NYTimes‘ Nate Cohn argues with John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times). So here is a set of comparisons of people born in 1981-1985 versus 1993-1997, surveyed when they were 18-29 years old. This is not about people (much less a generation) changing their minds or their experiences shifting — like the birthrate graph, this is different people that are for some reason treated as if they were in the same meaningful group.

For these comparisons, I used the General Social Survey, from 2000 to 2022. For each indicator I used ordinal logistic regression, and controlled for age and sex when making these predicted values (none of them had very large sex differences).* This is just about 1200 respondents in the older group and 1000 in the younger group, but fewer for some comparisons (I show 95% confidence intervals for random error). Summary below the figure.

Summary: During the ages 18-29, those born in the 1990s were less happy, had less sex, were less conservative, went to church less, were more likely to favor abortion rights, and opposed stereotypical gender roles more. And, we know they had fewer children (at older ages). A lot changed between the early and late parts of this non-generation. (Note I’m showing this as cohort differences, but they also reflect period changes, of course — it’s comparing 18-29-year-olds at two overlapping points in time.)

Lots of people tell me that because they are early or late Millennials they don’t fit with the category, and I’m sorry they are wasting their energy even considering the question. My advice: forget the fake category. It was never justified in its creation (not just poorly justified — just not justified at all). If you’re an information consumer, know that they people making you click on this stuff don’t love you.

Researchers should make cohort categories around relevant historical events (wars, recessions, technology) if that works for their analysis, or arbitrarily (years, decades) if they are just trying to use fewer categories. And don’t name your “generations” unless you have a reason (besides thirst for clicks).

* My Stata code is here. osf.io/amu5v. Your results will look different unless you also use this scheme for your graphics.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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