This word ‘generation,’ I do not think it means what you think it means

The people who make up these things drive me bananas.

NPR launched a new series on “millennials” yesterday, called “New Boom,” with this dramatic declaration: “There are more millennials in America right now than baby boomers — more than 80 million of us.”

The definition NPR gives for this generation is “people born between 1980 and 2000.” And it’s true there are more than 80 million of them. In fact, there are 91 million of them, according to the 2012 American Community Survey data you can get from IPUMS.org.* That’s OK, though, because there are only 76 million Baby Boomers, so the claim checks out.

But what’s a generation?

The Baby Boom was a demographic event. In 1946, after the end of World War II, the crude birth rate — the number of births per 1,000 population — jumped from 20.4 to 24.1, the biggest one-year change recorded in U.S. history. The birth rate didn’t fall back to its previous level until 1965. That’s why the Baby Boom went down in history as 1946 to 1964. Because that’s when it happened.

This figure shows the number of living people by birth year, and the crude birth rate recorded in each year, using the NPR definition of millennials (in red), compared with the baby boom (purple):

Even with population growth I reckon the people born in the years 1946-1964 might outnumber the self-promoting millennials if not for the weight of mortality pulling down the purple bars. But if the young NPR reporters want to brag about outnumbering a generation that is starting to lose its older members to old age (and who are, after all, their parents), then I guess the shoe fits.

The Baby Boom was not a generation. It was a cohort, “a group of people sharing a common demographic experience” (in this case birth during the same period). That demographic event happens to have lasted 18 years, which is unfortunate because that may have contributed to the tendency to declare “generations” of similar lengths.

The Pew Research people, who do lots of interesting work on social change that uses generational concepts, use these slightly different definitions for four generations: Silent Generation, born 1928-1945; the Baby Boom Generation, born 1946-1964; Generation X, born 1965-1980; Millennial Generation, born 1981 and later (Pew says “no chronological endpoint has been set for this group,” which is awkward because if they’re really still going, the oldest are 33 and they have children that are the same generation as themselves**). Ironic, isn’t it, that Pew constructs “Generation X” as the shortest of the four (some generation, a mere 16 years!) before declaring them “America’s neglected ‘middle child.’”

Real generations rarely have starting and ending points on a population level. Populations usually just keeping having births every year in smooth patterns of increase or decrease without discrete edges, so generations overlap. Even in families it gets hard to nail down generations once you start moving horizontally; siblings born many years apart are in the same generation, but the cousins get all confused.

Meaningful cohorts, on the other hand, can be defined all over the place, such as: the people who graduated college during the Great Recession, people who introduced the Internet to their parents, and so on. These are not generations.

In 2010, when crisis was really in the air, I was on the NPR show The State of Things in North Carolina, discussing the Baby Boom (no audio online). After attempting to clarify the difference between a generation and a cohort, I offered this dramatic example of a cohort — people born in 1960 specifically:

So if you were born in 1960, graduated college in 1982, and entered the labor force in the middle of an awful recession, then managed to pull some kind of career together, got married and divorced, by the 90s it was time to be downsized already for the first time, you’re 40 in 2000, and it’s time for the dot-com bubble, you’re out of your job again, and here you are ready for your retirement, finally, you’ve been left in your own 401(k), having to put together your own pension, and of course now that’s in the tank and your house isn’t worth anything. So that insecurity and instability is really imprinted this group. We talk about the 60s, and civil rights and antiwar, and great music and everything, but that’s seeming like a long time ago now for people who are looking at retirement.

I don’t know if anyone actually had that experience, but it seems likely.

Anyway, if people really want to keep using these generation labels, and it seems unlikely to stop now given the marketing payoff from naming rights, than that’s the way it goes. But please don’t ask demographers to define them.

Notes

* This is a little different from the population estimates the Census Bureau produces, which are coded by age rather than year of birth. I use the ACS data because they report year of birth, and because it’s easier. The differences are very small.

** Thanks to Mo Willow for pointing this out.