“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.”

This was written 51 years ago by a Yale Law School professor, Charles Reich.  It’s an excerpt from a book called the “Greening of America” that went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.   He was in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 67′ and decided this new, sixties generation had found the way to change the post-industrial world, “revolution by consciousness” as he described it.

Contrast Reich’s view of this generation with, shall we say, a more robust sample.  In a 69′ Gallup poll 88% said they hadn’t smoked weed and 75% said the US should not withdraw from Vietnam.  Most people in the 60’s weren’t even especially liberal.  Among recent college grads 53% preferred Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

Extrapolation based on a polluted, small, biased sample with sweeping generalizations tied to birthdate simply doesn’t hold up for a decade of people.

That doesn’t bode well for the en vogue generational marketing that groups people based on even wider age bands.  Enter Gen Z.   These are the Gen Xer’s kids.  Mine I guess.  They were born in the mid to late 90s through the early 2010’s.  I suppose the generational marketing consultant’s full employment act is people continuing to be born.

And as proof that academics aren’t immune to snake oil peddling, enter ” Gen Z, Explained“, a book coming out later this year – can’t wait – and written by four academics; a historian, a linguist, a sociologist and an anthropologist.  If that isn’t a ready made intro to a “walk into a bar joke” I don’t know what is.

Their sample is college kids from elite universities.  What could possibly go wrong?  But they didn’t leave sampling bias to chance, they doubled down on relying on “narratives” from hour-long interviews and a few focus groups.  They did include two broader sample surveys though whenever  a discrepancy appears  they awkwardly default to discounting the surveys.

Their view of Gen Z?  Glowing.  They are “self-identified and self reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical or selfish.”   They go on, “they have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive and non-hierarchical).”

And here are the lessons they apparently have to teach us, “be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, make the world kinder, live by your values”.

Does anyone read that and think, “Wow, that’s a super unique perspective on life”?

A 2019 survey had the other faux generations assign the top five characteristics to Gen-Z.  The older people’s top 5 were “tech-savvy”, “materialistic”, “selfish”, “lazy” and “arrogant”.  Ouch.  The same survey asked Gen-Z to describe itself.  They chose the same top 5.

Asking people what they think of themselves and then repeating their answers is not sociology or science.  Taking those answers that have been heavily filtered through personal biases and writing a book with the bold declaration that you’ve cracked the code on millions of people sharing a wide-ranging birth date is beyond hubris.

Generational marketing is lazy, weak-minded and wildly inaccurate stereotyping.  The differences between any two “generations” are dwarfed by the differences within a given generation.    Your fundraising will suffer no more or less if you choose astrology as your source for donor understanding.

Genetics (e.g. Personality, Identity), environment and context all matter to what makes us different and similar.  If you start with age as your arbiter for insight you lose all that rich, validated nuance.

Kevin

P.S. This post was inspired and directly sourced from an article in the New Yorker if you’re interested.  The meek borrow, genius steal.