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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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How Teens Today Are Different from Past Generations

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future.

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

Disclosure statement

Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

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Essay on Today’s Generation

Students are often asked to write an essay on Today’s Generation in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Understanding today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often called Generation Z, is a tech-savvy group born between 1997 and 2012. They are digital natives, growing up with the internet, smartphones, and social media.

Adapting to Change

This generation adapts to change quickly. They are used to fast-paced technological advancements and are comfortable learning new things. They value diversity and inclusivity.

Challenges Faced

Despite their adaptability, they face challenges like online bullying and mental health issues. The pressure to always be ‘connected’ can be overwhelming.

Understanding today’s generation helps us to nurture their talents and address their challenges effectively.

250 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Introduction.

Today’s generation, often referred to as Generation Z or the iGeneration, is a demographic cohort following the millennials. Born between the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2010s, they are the first generation to be raised in the era of smartphones and social media, which has significantly impacted their communication styles, values, and worldviews.

Characteristics of Today’s Generation

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativeness. They are comfortable with technology, having grown up with the internet, smartphones, and social media as integral parts of their lives. This has led to a generation that is highly connected, with global perspectives and a strong sense of social responsibility.

Challenges and Opportunities

However, this digital immersion also presents challenges. The over-reliance on technology can lead to issues like cyberbullying, privacy concerns, and mental health problems. Yet, it also presents opportunities. Today’s generation is adept at multitasking, quick to adapt to new technologies, and skilled at leveraging digital platforms for creative expression and social activism.

The unique characteristics and challenges of today’s generation are shaping the world in new ways. As digital natives, they are redefining communication, education, and work, and are poised to drive significant societal and technological advancements. Understanding and addressing their needs and aspirations is crucial for creating a future that leverages their strengths and mitigates their challenges.

500 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

The characteristics of today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often referred to as Generation Z or the iGeneration, is markedly different from its predecessors. Born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, this generation is the first to grow up in a world where the internet, social media, and advanced technology are the norm rather than the exception.

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativity. Unlike previous generations who had to adapt to the digital world, today’s youth are born into it. They are comfortable navigating the digital landscape, be it for communication, education, or entertainment. This has enabled them to develop skills such as multitasking and information filtering at an early age.

Impact of Technology on Today’s Generation

However, the ubiquity of technology also brings challenges. Cyberbullying, online privacy threats, and the potential for misinformation are significant concerns. Moreover, the overuse of technology can lead to issues like decreased physical activity and face-to-face social interaction. Balancing the benefits and drawbacks of technology is a unique challenge for today’s generation.

Societal and Environmental Consciousness

Today’s generation is remarkably conscious of societal and environmental issues. They are more likely to champion causes such as climate change, mental health, and social justice. This heightened awareness and activism are largely facilitated by social media, which provides a platform for sharing information, rallying support, and mobilizing action.

The Future and Today’s Generation

However, it’s crucial to remember that today’s generation is not a monolith. Their experiences and perspectives are diverse, shaped by factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, and geography. As such, it’s essential to avoid overgeneralizing and to appreciate the richness of their individual experiences.

In conclusion, today’s generation is a dynamic and complex group. They are digital natives, navigating a world interwoven with technology. They are socially and environmentally conscious, driven to make a positive impact on the world. And despite the challenges they face, they are resilient, adaptable, and poised to shape the future. Understanding them is not just an academic exercise, but a necessity for anyone looking to stay relevant in an ever-evolving world.

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• School Education /

Essay on Generation Gap: 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 29, 2023

Have you ever found it difficult to communicate your ideas and emotions to those who are either younger or older than you? Do you find it difficult to persuade your elders to take action? Do you ever feel that your priorities, perspective, and way of thinking are completely different from those of your own parents? Sounds relatable? You are not alone! This is what the generation gap looks like. The generation gap refers to the differences in our opinions, points of view, and perspectives about other people. The generation gap takes place due to developments and changes around the world. Adapting to a new environment has always been in human nature. In the beginning, we all struggle to adapt to new changes, but, with time we adapt ourselves and cope with the new conditions. Here are some sample essay on the generation gap for school students.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Generation Gap in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Generation Gap in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Generation Gap in 300 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 100 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 200 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 300 Words

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Also Read: How to Prepare for UPSC in 6 Months?

Ans: The generation gap is a natural phenomenon where people with different values and perspectives clash. What one views as good might not be the same for someone from a different age group. The generation gap is caused due to factors such as technological advancements, the evolution of societal values and cultural norms, changes in communication styles, and other factors. The generation gap is a broader concept and it is essential for us to embrace and bridge this gap.

The generation gap can be bridged by fostering mutual understanding, education, putting yourself in other’s shoes, and emphasizing common values of respect, trust, kindness, etc.

Ans: Older generations can teach the value of time and respecting elders. They can encourage us to follow our passion, take care of our health, not to sweat small stuff, not to judge people, etc.

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With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Generation Gap — Generation Gap: The Differences Between New Generation And Parents’ Generation

Generation Gap: How Today's Generation is Different from Their Parents' Generation

• Categories: Generation Generation Gap

About this sample

Words: 1119 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 1119 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, difference between old and new generation, works cited:, jobs fields, educational prospects.

• Bergsteiner, H., & Avery, G. C. (2010). The importance of learning styles: Understanding the implications for learning, course design, and education. Education Sciences, 1(2), 116-125.
• Kinsella, E. A. (2010). The Kolb Learning Style Inventory—Version 3.1 2005 technical specifications. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 31(2-3), 271-276.
• McDonald, J., & Boud, D. (2003). The impact of self-assessment on achievement: The effects of self-assessment training on performance in external examinations. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 10(2), 209-220.
• Murphy, J. (2004). Exploring Kolb's learning styles in management education. Journal of Management Education, 28(2), 191-210.
• Nicol, D., Macfarlane‐Dick, D., & Macfarlane, S. (2006). Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2), 139-149

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Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?

In general, they’re better educated – a factor tied to employment and financial well-being – but there is a sharp divide between the economic fortunes of those who have a college education and those who don’t.

Millennials have brought more racial and ethnic diversity to American society. And Millennial women, like Generation X women, are more likely to participate in the nation’s workforce than prior generations.

Compared with previous generations, Millennials – those ages 22 to 37 in 2018 – are delaying or foregoing marriage and have been somewhat slower in forming their own households. They are also more likely to be living at home with their parents, and for longer stretches.

And Millennials are now the second-largest generation in the U.S. electorate (after Baby Boomers), a fact that continues to shape the country’s politics given their Democratic leanings when compared with older generations.

Those are some of the broad strokes that have emerged from Pew Research Center’s work on Millennials over the past few years. Now that the youngest Millennials are in their 20s, we have done a comprehensive update of our prior demographic work on generations. Here are the details.

Today’s young adults are much better educated than their grandparents, as the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher has steadily climbed since 1968. Among Millennials, around four-in-ten (39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.

Gains in educational attainment have been especially steep for young women. Among women of the Silent Generation, only 11% had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree when they were young (ages 25 to 37 in 1968). Millennial women are about four times (43%) as likely as their Silent predecessors to have completed as much education at the same age. Millennial men are also better educated than their predecessors. About one-third of Millennial men (36%) have at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly double the share of Silent Generation men (19%) when they were ages 25 to 37.

While educational attainment has steadily increased for men and women over the past five decades, the share of Millennial women with a bachelor’s degree is now higher than that of men – a reversal from the Silent Generation and Boomers. Gen X women were the first to outpace men in terms of education, with a 3-percentage-point advantage over Gen X men in 2001. Before that, late Boomer men in 1989 had a 2-point advantage over Boomer women.

Boomer women surged into the workforce as young adults, setting the stage for more Gen X and Millennial women to follow suit. In 1966, when Silent Generation women were ages 22 through 37, a majority (58%) were not participating in the labor force while 40% were employed. For Millennial women today, 72% are employed while just a quarter are not in the labor force. Boomer women were the turning point. As early as 1985, more young Boomer women were employed (66%) than were not in the labor force (28%).

And despite a reputation for job hopping, Millennial workers are just as likely to stick with their employers as Gen X workers were when they were the same age. Roughly seven-in-ten each of Millennials ages 22 to 37 in 2018 (70%) and Gen Xers the same age in 2002 (69%) reported working for their current employer at least 13 months. About three-in-ten of both groups said they’d been with their employer for at least five years.

Of course, the economy varied for each generation. While the Great Recession affected Americans broadly, it created a particularly challenging job market for Millennials entering the workforce. The unemployment rate was especially high for America’s youngest adults in the years just after the recession, a reality that would impact Millennials’ future earnings and wealth.

Income and wealth

The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.

Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001. But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations. For example, Millennial workers with some college education reported making $36,000, lower than the $38,900 early Baby Boomer workers made at the same age in 1982. The pattern is similar for those young adults who never attended college.

Millennials in 2018 had a median household income of roughly $71,400, similar to that of Gen X young adults ($70,700) in 2001. (This analysis is in 2017 dollars and is adjusted for household size. Additionally, household income includes the earnings of the young adult, as well as the income of anyone else living in the household.)

The growing gap by education is even more apparent when looking at annual household income. For households headed by Millennials ages 25 to 37 in 2018, the median adjusted household income was about $105,300 for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, roughly $56,000 greater than that of households headed by high school graduates. The median household income difference by education for prior generations ranged from $41,200 for late Boomers to $19,700 for the Silent Generation when they were young.

While young adults in general do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials have slightly less wealth than Boomers did at the same age. The median net worth of households headed by Millennials (ages 20 to 35 in 2016) was about $12,500 in 2016, compared with $20,700 for households headed by Boomers the same age in 1983. Median net worth of Gen X households at the same age was about $15,100.

This modest difference in wealth can be partly attributed to differences in debt by generation. Compared with earlier generations, more Millennials have outstanding student debt, and the amount of it they owe tends to be greater. The share of young adult households with any student debt doubled from 1998 (when Gen Xers were ages 20 to 35) to 2016 (when Millennials were that age). In addition, the median amount of debt was nearly 50% greater for Millennials with outstanding student debt ($19,000) than for Gen X debt holders when they were young ($12,800).

Millennials, hit hard by the Great Recession, have been somewhat slower in forming their own households than previous generations. They’re more likely to live in their parents’ home and also more likely to be at home for longer stretches . In 2018, 15% of Millennials (ages 25 to 37) were living in their parents’ home. This is nearly double the share of early Boomers and Silents (8% each) and 6 percentage points higher than Gen Xers who did so when they were the same age.

The rise in young adults living at home is especially prominent among those with lower education. Millennials who never attended college were twice as likely as those with a bachelor’s degree or more to live with their parents (20% vs. 10%). This gap was narrower or nonexistent in previous generations. Roughly equal shares of Silents (about 7% each) lived in their parents’ home when they were ages 25 to 37, regardless of educational attainment.

Millennials are also moving significantly less than earlier generations of young adults. About one-in-six Millennials ages 25 to 37 (16%) have moved in the past year. For previous generations at the same age, roughly a quarter had.

On the whole, Millennials are starting families later than their counterparts in prior generations. Just under half (46%) of Millennials ages 25 to 37 are married, a steep drop from the 83% of Silents who were married in 1968. The share of 25- to 37-year-olds who were married steadily dropped for each succeeding generation, from 67% of early Boomers to 57% of Gen Xers. This in part reflects broader societal shifts toward marrying later in life. In 1968, the typical American woman first married at age 21 and the typical American man first wed at 23. Today, those figures have climbed to 28 for women and 30 for men.

But it’s not all about delayed marriage. The share of adults who have never married is increasing with each successive generation. If current patterns continue, an estimated one-in-four of today’s young adults will have never married by the time they reach their mid-40s to early 50s – a record high share.

In prior generations, those ages 25 to 37 whose highest level of education was a high school diploma were more likely than those with a bachelor’s degree or higher to be married. Gen Xers reversed this trend, and the divide widened among Millennials. Four-in-ten Millennials with just a high school diploma (40%) are currently married, compared with 53% of Millennials with at least a bachelor’s degree. In comparison, 86% of Silent Generation high school graduates were married in 1968 versus 81% of Silents with a bachelor’s degree or more.

Millennial women are also waiting longer to become parents than prior generations did. In 2016, 48% of Millennial women (ages 20 to 35 at the time) were moms. When Generation X women were the same age in 2000, 57% were already mothers, similar to the share of Boomer women (58%) in 1984. Still, Millennial women now account for the vast majority of annual U.S. births, and more than 17 million Millennial women have become mothers.

Younger generations (Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z) now make up a clear majority of America’s voting-eligible population . As of November 2018, nearly six-in-ten adults eligible to vote (59%) were from one of these three generations, with Boomers and older generations making up the other 41%.

However, young adults have historically been less likely to vote than their older counterparts, and these younger generations have followed that same pattern, turning out to vote at lower rates than older generations in recent elections.

In the 2016 election, Millennials and Gen Xers cast more votes than Boomers and older generations, giving the younger generations a slight majority of total votes cast. However, higher shares of Silent/Greatest generation eligible voters (70%) and Boomers (69%) reported voting in the 2016 election compared with Gen X (63%) and Millennial (51%) eligible voters. Going forward, Millennial turnout may increase as this generation grows older.

Generational differences in political attitudes and partisan affiliation are as wide as they have been in decades. Among registered voters, 59% of Millennials affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Boomers and Gen Xers (48% each) and 43% of the Silent Generation. With this divide comes generational differences on specific issue areas , from views of racial discrimination and immigration to foreign policy and the scope of government.

Population change and the future

By 2019, Millennials are projected to number 73 million, overtaking Baby Boomers as the largest living adult generation . Although a greater number of births underlie the Baby Boom generation, Millennials will outnumber Boomers in part because immigration has been boosting their numbers.

Millennials are also bringing more racial and ethnic diversity. When the Silent Generation was young (ages 22 to 37), 84% were non-Hispanic white. For Millennials, the share is just 55%. This change is driven partly by the growing number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants , whose ranks have increased since the Boomer generation. The increased prevalence of interracial marriage and differences in fertility patterns have also contributed to the country’s shifting racial and ethnic makeup.

Looking ahead at the next generation, early benchmarks show Generation Z (those ages 6 to 21 in 2018) is on track to be the nation’s most diverse and best-educated generation yet. Nearly half (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. And while most are still in K-12 schools, the oldest Gen Zers are enrolling in college at a higher rate than even Millennials were at their age. Early indications are that their opinions on issues are similar to those of Millennials .

Of course, Gen Z is still very young and may be shaped by future unknown events. But Pew Research Center looks forward to spending the next few years studying life for this new generation as it enters adulthood.

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How to Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future—Not Our Past

Moving forward, young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world

In this Issue:

• Spring 2020 View All Other Issues
• Notes From the President: The Learning Curve
• Crunch: Lifelong Learning
• Foreword: Learning Is a Science
• Neuroscience in the Classroom
• Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future
• Lifelong Learning
• Americans and Lifetime Learning
• Personal Learning
• Machines Are Learning
• Five Questions: How the Brain Learns
• Voices: Learning Requires...
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Almost 12 million students who took the global test known as PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) were not able to complete even the most basic reading, mathematics, or science tasks—and these were 15-year-olds living in the 72 high- and middle-income countries that participated in the last test in 2015.

Over the past decade, there has been virtually no improvement in the learning outcomes of students in the Western world, even though spending on schooling rose by almost 20 percent during this period. And in countries like the United States, the quality of learning outcomes can still best be predicted by a school’s ZIP code.

So it might be tempting to click on some other article and drop any thought about improving education. Is it impossible to change anything as big, complex, and entrenched in vested interests as education? Well, keep on reading and consider this: The learning outcomes among the most disadvantaged 10 percent of Vietnamese and Estonian 15-year-old students now compare favorably with those among the wealthiest 10 percent of families in most of Latin America and are on a par with those of the average student in the United States and Europe.

Consider that in most countries, we can find excellence in education in some of the most disadvantaged schools—and that many of today’s leading education systems have only recently attained these top positions. So it can be done. 

But change can be a struggle. Young people are less likely to invest their time and energy in better education if it seems irrelevant to the demands of the “real” world. Businesses are less likely to invest in their employees’ lifelong learning if those workers might move away for a better job. And policymakers are often more likely to prioritize immediate concerns over long-range issues.

But this long-range view is necessary. For those with the right knowledge and skills, digitalization and globalization have been liberating and exciting, while for those who are insufficiently prepared, they can mean vulnerable and insecure work, and a life with few prospects. Our economies are shifting toward regional hubs of production, linked by global chains of information and goods but concentrated where comparative advantage can be built and renewed. This makes the distribution of knowledge and wealth crucial, and that is intimately tied to the distribution of educational opportunities.

In this digitalized global age, the next generation of young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world. That will require imagination, empathy, resilience, and entrepreneurship, the ability to fail forward. The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning. People used to learn to do the work; now learning is the work, and the post-industrial era will require coaching, mentoring, teaching, and evaluating that can build passion for learning.

There must be an appreciation for the value of learning well beyond high school, beyond college graduation. People need to take ownership over what they learn, how they learn, where they learn, and when they learn. And lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Governments can help. The easiest way is telling young people more of the truth about the social and labor-market relevance of their learning. Education systems can be incentivized to help learners choose a field of study that resonates with their passions, in which they can excel, and that allows them to contribute to society, putting people on the path to success. Unfortunately, many educational institutions still focus on marketing fields of study that are easy to provide, which leaves some university graduates struggling to find good jobs even as employers say they cannot find the people with needed skills. In many countries, such skill mismatches keep rising.

Lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Also needed moving forward is a shift from qualifications-based certification systems to more knowledge- and skills-based certification systems. That means moving from documenting education pathways and degrees to highlighting what individuals can actually do, regardless of how and where they acquired their knowledge, skills, and character qualities. As the digital transformation diversifies training and learning opportunities, this certification of knowledge and skills becomes increasingly important, and businesses are increasingly testing knowledge and skills on their own while relying less on diplomas.

The dilemma for education is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach have become easy to digitize and automate. There is no question that state-of-the-art knowledge and skills in a discipline will always remain important. But the modern world no longer rewards us just for what we know—Google knows everything—but for extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge creatively in novel situations. The industrial age taught us how to educate students so they could remember what we told them; in the age of artificial intelligence, we will need to think harder about how we can pair the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social, and emotional skills and values of people.

Whether artificial intelligence will destroy or create more jobs will very much depend on our success with this and whether our imagination, our awareness, and our sense of responsibility will help us harness technology to shape the world for the better. It is telling that employment in Europe’s creative industries—those that specialize in the use of talent for commercial purposes—grew at 3.6 percent during the crucial period between 2011 and 2013, a time when many European sectors were shedding jobs or showing stagnant employment rates.

Moreover, technology and artificial intelligence are not magic powers; they are just extraordinary amplifiers and accelerators that add speed and accuracy. Artificial intelligence will amplify good ideas and good practice in the same way that it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice; i.e., artificial intelligence is ethically neutral. However, it is always in the hands of people who are not neutral. That is why education in the future is not just about teaching people something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass to navigate an increasingly complex, ambiguous, and volatile world. Ethics will be at the heart of 21st-century learning.

There are other important dimensions too. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by synthesizing different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. That requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.

Not least, social skills are rising in labor-market relevance, so tomorrow’s citizens will need to think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge. Employers increasingly seek to attract learners who easily adapt and can share, apply, and transfer their skills and knowledge. At work, at home, and in the community, people will need a deep understanding of how others live in different cultures and traditions and how others think, whether as scientists or artists. Digitalization can enrich this capacity but also put it at risk.

The challenge is that developing such cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities requires a very different approach to teaching and learning, well beyond imparting and absorbing prefabricated knowledge. In the most advanced education systems, teaching has become a profession of advanced knowledge workers who own their professional practice and who work with a high level of professional autonomy and within a collaborative culture. In Finland, there tend to be nine applicants for every teaching post, not because teaching is financially more attractive than in other countries but because teaching in Finland is intellectually attractive.

The past was divided, with teachers and content divided by subjects, and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects. Nowadays, education is becoming more integrated, with an emphasis on the interrelation of subjects and the integration of students. It is also becoming more connected, with learning closely related to real-world contexts and contemporary issues and open to the rich resources in the community, becoming project-based, and helping students to think across the boundaries of subject-matter disciplines.

Some education systems also embrace technology in ways that elevate the role of teachers as co-creators and designers of innovative learning environments. Digital learning systems cannot just teach us science; they can simultaneously observe how we learn and determine the kinds of tasks and thinking that interest us—as well as the kinds of problems that we find boring or difficult. These systems can then adapt learning to suit our personal learning style with far greater granularity and precision than any traditional classroom setting possibly can. Similarly, virtual laboratories give us the opportunity to design, conduct, and learn from experiments rather than just learning about them.

Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge.

There are good examples of technology enhancing experiential learning by supporting project- and inquiry-based teaching methods, facilitating hands-on activities and cooperative learning, and delivering formative real-time assessments. There are also interesting examples of technology supporting learning with interactive, nonlinear courseware based on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated software for experimentation and simulation, social media, and educational games. These are precisely the learning tools that are needed to develop 21st-century knowledge and skills. Not least, one teacher can now educate and inspire millions of learners and communicate ideas to the whole world.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is that it not only serves individual learners and educators, but it also can build an ecosystem around learning to create communities that make learning more social and more fun, recognizing that collaborative learning enhances goal orientation, motivation, persistence, and the development of effective learning strategies.

Similarly, technology can build communities of teachers to share and enrich teaching resources and practices and to collaborate on professional growth and the institutionalization of professional practice. It can help system leaders and governments develop and share best practices around curriculum design, policy, and pedagogy. Imagine a giant crowdsourcing platform where teachers, education researchers, and policy experts collaborate to curate the most relevant content and professional practice to achieve education goals, and where students anywhere in the world have access to the best and most innovative education experiences.

The challenge is that such system transformation cannot be mandated by government, which leads to surface compliance, nor can it be built solely from the ground up.

Governments cannot innovate in the classroom, but government has a key role as platform and broker, as stimulator and enabler; it can focus resources, set a facilitative policy climate, and use accountability and reporting modifications to encourage new practice. But government needs to better identify key agents of change, champion them, and find more effective approaches to scaling and disseminating innovations. That is also about finding better ways to recognize, reward, and give exposure to success, to do whatever is possible to make it easier for innovators to take risks and encourage the emergence of new ideas. The past was about public versus private; the future is about public with private.

The challenges look daunting, but many education systems are now well on their way toward finding innovative responses to them, not just in isolated, local examples, but also systemically. This is essential if we are to create a future for millions of learners who currently do not have one. That task is not about making the impossible possible, but about making the possible attainable.

The Takeaway

The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning.

Andreas Schleicher is the director for education and skills and special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Future of Learning: A Career of Learning

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• Generate topic ideas for an essay or paper | Tips & techniques

Generate Topic Ideas For an Essay or Paper | Tips & Techniques

Published on November 17, 2014 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes.

If you haven’t been given a specific topic for your essay or paper , the first step is coming up with ideas and deciding what you want to write about. Generating ideas is the least methodical and most creative step in academic writing .

There are infinite ways to generate ideas, but no sure-fire way to come up with a good one. This article outlines some tips and techniques for choosing a topic – use the ones that work best for you.

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Table of contents

Understanding the assignment, techniques for generating topic ideas, tips for finding a good idea, other interesting articles.

First, you need to determine the scope of what you can write about. Make sure you understand the assignment you’ve been given, and make sure you know the answers to these questions:

• What is the required length of the paper (in words or pages)?
• What is the deadline?
• Should the paper relate to what you’ve studied in class?
• Do you have to do your own research and use sources that haven’t been taught in class?
• Are there any constraints on the subject matter or approach?

The length and deadline of the assignment determine how complex your topic can be. The prompt might tell you write a certain type of essay, or it might give you a broad subject area and hint at the kind of approach you should take.

This prompt gives us a very general subject. It doesn’t ask for a specific type of essay, but the word explain suggests that an expository essay is the most appropriate response.

This prompt takes a different approach to the same subject. It asks a question that requires you to take a strong position. This is an argumentative essay that requires you to use evidence from sources to support your argument.

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Getting started is often the hardest part. Try these 3 simple strategies to help get your mind moving.

Talk it out

Discussing ideas with a teacher, friend or fellow student often helps you find new avenues to approach the ideas you have and helps you uncover ideas you might not have considered.

Write down as many ideas as you can and make point form notes on them as you go. When you feel you’ve written down the obvious things that relate to an idea, move on to a new one, or explore a related idea in more depth.

You can also cluster related ideas together and draw connections between them on the page.

This strategy is similar to brainstorming, but it is faster and less reflective. Give yourself a broad topic to write about. Then, on a pad of paper or a word processor, write continuously for two or three minutes. Don’t stop, not even for a moment.

Write down anything that comes to mind, no matter how nonsensical it seems, as long as it somehow relates to the topic you began with. If you need to, time yourself to make sure you write for a few minutes straight.

When you’ve finished, read through what you’ve written and identify any useful ideas that have come out of the exercise.

Whichever strategy you use, you’ll probably come up with lots of ideas, but follow these tips to help you choose the best one.

Don’t feel you need to work logically

Good ideas often have strange origins. An apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, and this gave us the idea of gravity. Mary Shelley had a dream, and this gave us her famous literary classic, Frankenstein .

It does not matter how you get your idea; what matters is that you find a good one.

Work from general to specific

Your first good idea won’t take the form of a fully-formed thesis statement . Find a topic before you find an argument.

You’ll need to think about your topic in broad, general terms before you can narrow it down and make it more precise.

Maintain momentum

Don’t be critical of your ideas at this stage – it can hinder your creativity. If you think too much about the flaws in your ideas, you will lose momentum.

Creative momentum is important: the first ten in a string of related ideas might be garbage, but the eleventh could be pure gold. You’ll never reach the eleventh if you shut down your thought process at the second.

Let ideas go

Don’t get too attached to the first appealing topic you think of. It might be a great idea, but it also might turn out to be a dud once you start researching and give it some critical thought .

Thinking about a new topic doesn’t mean abandoning an old one – you can easily come back to your original ideas later and decide which ones work best.

Choose a topic that interests you

A bored writer makes for boring writing. Try to find an idea that you’ll enjoy writing about, or a way to integrate your interests with your topic.

In the worst case scenario, pick the least boring topic of all of the boring topics you’re faced with.

Keep a notepad close

Good ideas will cross your mind when you least expect it. When they do, make sure that you can hold onto them.

Many people come up with their best ideas just before falling asleep; you might find it useful to keep a notepad by your bed.

Once you’ve settled on an idea, you’ll need to start working on your thesis statement and planning your paper’s structure.

If you find yourself struggling to come up with a good thesis on your topic, it might not be the right choice – you can always change your mind and go back to previous ideas.

Write a thesis statement Make an essay outline

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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INTERAUTO Krasnogorsk

| International automotive industry fair

On the whole the organisers welcomed on the 4 days of the fair, from 23. August to 26. August 2022, about 100 exhibitors from 6 countries and 6000 visitors on the INTERAUTO in Krasnogorsk.

The INTERAUTO takes place annually, and therefore for the eighteenth time previsibly in August 2025 in Krasnogorsk.

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Downtown Krasnogorsk: 11.60 km in a straight line

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Where does the INTERAUTO taking place? The INTERAUTO fair takes place in Krasnogorsk, at the Crocus Expo International Exhibition Centre.

When is the INTERAUTO taking place? Visit the INTERAUTO from .

How often does the INTERAUTO take place? The INTERAUTO takes place annually.

What kind of fair is the INTERAUTO? The INTERAUTO is an exhibition for Car Accessories, Automotive Accessories and Automotive Engineering.

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Welcome to Krasnogorsk! Located just 20 kilometers west of Moscow, this vibrant city offers a unique blend of historical charm and modern attractions. Known for its picturesque landscapes and rich cultural heritage, Krasnogorsk is a must-visit destination for travelers seeking an authentic Russian experience. Explore the city's stunning architecture, including the iconic Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, or take a stroll along the scenic Moskva River. For those interested in history, the Krasnogorsk Museum of History and Local Lore provides fascinating insights into the region's past. With its convenient location and diverse range of activities, Krasnogorsk promises an unforgettable journey for all who visit.

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Krasnogorsk offers a variety of activities and attractions for visitors to enjoy. Whether you are interested in exploring nature , immersing yourself in history , or indulging in cultural experiences , this city has something for everyone.

One of the main attractions in Krasnogorsk is the Arkhangelskoye Estate , a beautiful historical complex that dates back to the 18th century. Visitors can explore the stunning palace , wander through the picturesque gardens , and learn about the estates rich history . The estate also hosts various cultural events and exhibitions , providing a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in Russian art and culture .

For those who enjoy outdoor activities , Krasnogorsk offers several parks and recreational areas . The Krasnogorsk City Park is a popular spot for picnics and leisurely walks , while the Krasnogorskoye Reservoir provides opportunities for boating , fishing , and relaxing by the water . Nature enthusiasts can also visit the nearby Moscow Canal , where they can hike , cycle , or simply enjoy the scenic views .

If you are interested in history , a visit to the Krasnogorsk Museum of Local Lore is a must. This museum showcases the history and culture of the region, with exhibits ranging from archaeological artifacts to folk art . The museum also offers educational programs and guided tours , allowing visitors to deepen their understanding of the areas past.

For those looking for entertainment , Krasnogorsk has a variety of theaters and concert halls . The Krasnogorsk Cultural Center regularly hosts performances , including theater productions , musical concerts , and dance shows . Attending a performance here is a great way to experience the local arts scene and enjoy a night out .

Lastly, dont forget to indulge in the local cuisine while in Krasnogorsk.

Check out these Experiences around the Krasnogorsk region. Read real reviews and highlights.

Check out Top-Rated Tours and Activities in Moscow Oblast (State region of Krasnogorsk).

The best time to visit Krasnogorsk is during the summer months of June, July, and August . During this time, the weather is mild and pleasant , with average temperatures ranging from 18°C to 25°C . The days are long , with up to 18 hours of daylight , allowing visitors to make the most of their time exploring the city and its surroundings. Additionally, many outdoor activities such as hiking, biking, and boating are available during the summer months. However, it is important to note that summer is also the peak tourist season , so expect larger crowds and higher prices for accommodations and attractions. If you prefer a quieter and more budget-friendly experience, consider visiting in the shoulder seasons of spring (April and May) or autumn (September and October) . During these times, the weather is still pleasant , with average temperatures ranging from 10°C to 15°C , and there are fewer tourists . Winter in Krasnogorsk can be extremely cold , with temperatures dropping below freezing and heavy snowfall . However, if you enjoy winter sports such as skiing or ice skating , this can be a great time to visit.

Use our flight calendar to discover the Cheapest Days and Months to Book Flight to Krasnogorsk.

Krasnogorsk is a vibrant city located just outside of Moscow. It offers a variety of great areas for accommodation, each with its own unique charm and amenities.

Krasnogorsk City Center is the heart of the city and is a popular choice for those who want to be in the midst of the action. Here, you will find a wide range of hotels, apartments, and guesthouses to suit every budget. The area is known for its bustling streets, shopping centers, and a vibrant nightlife scene.

Krasnogorskaya Embankment is a picturesque area located along the Moscow River. It offers stunning views of the river and is perfect for those who enjoy outdoor activities such as jogging or cycling. The area is dotted with cozy bed and breakfasts and boutique hotels, providing a peaceful and relaxing atmosphere for visitors.

Krasnogorsk Residential Districts are ideal for those who prefer a quieter and more residential setting. These areas offer a range of modern apartment complexes and private houses, providing a comfortable and homely environment for long-term stays. The residential districts are well-connected to the city center and offer easy access to amenities such as supermarkets, parks, and schools.

Krasnogorsk Industrial Zone is a great choice for business travelers or those who are interested in the citys industrial sector. This area is home to a number of business hotels and serviced apartments, providing convenient accommodation options for those working in the nearby industrial facilities. The area also offers easy access to transportation links, making it a practical choice for those who need to travel frequently.

Overall, Krasnogorsk offers a diverse range of accommodation options to suit every preference. Whether you prefer to be in the heart of the city or in a more peaceful residential area, you are sure to find the perfect place to stay in this vibrant Russian city.

Use our All-in-one Map to find Best Hotels, Vacation Rentals, Tours, Activities and Restaurants in Krasnogorsk.

There are several transportation options to get to Krasnogorsk.

1. By plane : The nearest airport to Krasnogorsk is Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO), which is located approximately 20 kilometers away. From the airport, you can take a taxi or use public transportation to reach Krasnogorsk.

2. By train : Krasnogorsk has a train station called Krasnogorskaya, which is connected to the Moscow Central Ring. You can take a train from Moscow to Krasnogorskaya station.

3. By bus : There are several bus routes that connect Krasnogorsk to Moscow and other nearby cities. You can take a bus from Moscow to Krasnogorsk.

4. By car : If you have access to a car, you can drive to Krasnogorsk. The city is located approximately 30 kilometers west of Moscow, and you can reach it via the M1 or M9 highways.

5. By taxi : You can also hire a taxi or use ride-sharing services to travel to Krasnogorsk from Moscow or other nearby cities.

It is recommended to check the schedules and availability of transportation options before your trip to ensure a smooth journey.

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Nearby Destination From Krasnogorsk

1. Moscow : The capital city of Russia, known for its iconic landmarks such as the Red Square and the Kremlin.

2. Zelenograd : A satellite city of Moscow, famous for its high-tech industries and research centers.

3. Khimki : A town located near Moscow, home to the Khimki Forest, one of the largest forests in the Moscow region.

4. Mytishchi : A historic town near Moscow, known for its beautiful parks and architectural landmarks.

5. Odintsovo : A suburban town near Moscow, offering a peaceful atmosphere and picturesque landscapes.

6. Krasnogorsk : The city itself, known for its vibrant cultural scene and the Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center.

7. Istra : A town located on the banks of the Istra River, famous for its stunning monasteries and historical sites.

8. Dolgoprudny : A small town near Moscow, known for its prestigious universities and scientific institutions.

9. Krasnogorskoye : A village near Krasnogorsk, offering a tranquil countryside experience with beautiful nature trails.

10. Nakhabino : A village known for its luxurious country estates and golf courses, providing a relaxing getaway from the city.

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