Loyal readers of this blog know that I’ve been combating the prevalent Madison Avenue-concocted generational model for years, along with fellow authors David Stewart and JD Cowan.
Much of our understanding of what, say a Zommer or a Millennial is comes from ad agencies who draw arbitrary lines between cohorts to help sell stuff.
And those ad hoc lines move at the big marketing firms’ whim.
Which is how we get absurdities like lumping people who grew up without internet into the same cohort as those who’ve had smartphones since childhood. You’re just not going to get useful descriptive or predictive data from that model.
One of the pop demographers’ first and biggest mistakes is starting from the assumption that a generation lasts twenty years.
If you account for not just the extent of social change, but how the rate of change has accelerated, ten-year generations make more sense from a cultural perspective.
Like most ideas that challenge the status quo, this concept has gotten no small measure of pushback.
That’s why it’s vindicating to see the great Steve Sailer reach similar conclusions independently.
With all due respect, Sailer’s main argument for ten-year generations is on the money. It’s just that the Trump-Biden dichotomy he cites undermines how he applies it.
It would be hard to pick two current politicians who are more different than Trump and Biden.
Say what you want about Trump, he’s always had a real job in the private sector. You can point to tangible stuff he’s produced.
Biden, in contrast, has been a creature of the system from the start. He’s never not subsisted on the permanent bureaucracy.
That’s not even getting into differences in attitude and temperament.
Now, it’s not that Biden’s parasitic lifestyle is definitive of the Silent Generation. He’s quite an outlier in that regard. The point is that choosing such wildly different guys as examples of the same cohort argues against that point.
Regardless, Biden is in fact a Silent, and Trump is the quintessential Boomer.
And the observed parameters of 1935-1945 for Silents and 1946-1956 for Boomers fit both of them perfectly.
That’s not to flex on Sailer. He’s doing important work challenging the dominant generational narrative.
And as folks are noticing, he and I seem to be feeling out the contours of the same elephant.
Makes you wonder how else you’ve been manipulated by the establishment marketing machine.
Learn how they’ve been lying to you – and how to reclaim your dignity.
