Identifying a Generation

Something I've mentioned in previous posts without an explanation, despite the fact it perhaps deserves one, is the name for my generation - the Millennials.  I will talk a bit about the naming of generations now.

The most famous 'named' generation is surely the Baby Boomers.  These were the generation born in the years immediately after WW2, when the birth rate in developed countries 'boomed'.  By various definintions, this generation includes those born up until various dates in the late 50s or early 60s.  The most common consensus seems to be about 1960.  What interests me is the nature of the debate about when one generation ends and the next one begins.  Suppose that we took the babies of 1960 as being the last birth year of the Baby Boomers.  In that case, we should expect to find many ways of easily spotting differences between those born in 1946-1960 versus those born after 1961 (who are known as Generation X).

So what of the Millennials?  By the same reasoning as for the Baby Boomers and Generation X; in order to identify the Millennials (or Generation Y) as a distinct generation, they need not only to have a different range of birth years, but there also ought to be a number of easily identifiable differences in their lives.  Perhaps they vote differently, have different educational or employment prospects, or different financial wellbeing.  They could usher in a new type of music or consumerism, fashion or food.  Preferably, almost all of these would be evident in order for us to identify them as a separate generation.  Moreover, if I were to choose arbitrary years as the start and end points for a 'generation', it ought to be rather harder for me to do the same thing.

The consensus that seems to be building across the media articles and blog posts I read is that the Millennials - those who entered adolescence in the new millennium rather than the old one - satisfy a lot of these properties.  I will leave it to the rest of the media, as well as perhaps some of my own future blog posts, to identify the ways in which our generations differ, however I will finish here with one observation.

Using Google NGram Viewer (a powerful tool which looks at the frequency of words in books) we can investigate how these distinct generations come to be recognised in published works (the data series currently only runs to 2008).  The first illustration I give below shows very clearly that the amount that is written about the baby boomers is certainly growing, however we really can't ignore the trends associated with the other generations.



My favourite is the following one.  Sadly Google Ngram Viewer currently only has data going as far as 2008, but from this, it does begin to look that our generation is rather more discussed, possibly easier to identify, than the one which went before!