What’s the story (with the future of family demography)

Do family demography in light of disasters, inequalities, identities, and policies as messy, incoherent, unpredictable features of society – not bugs in the ointment of modern progress.

Inequality and social change, 2022 pontification edition

Perception, reality, trauma and response, inequality and social change. I talked for an hour.

Demographic facts all students should know right now

If anyone tells you that "facts are useless in an emergency," give them a bad grade.

Alexa devaluation, cutting room floor edition

Not only named after a robot, but a subservient female one.

Pew response and attempted clarification

46% of people both "correctly" identified their generation title, and said the term describes them "well."

What the editors of 6000 journals tell us about gender, international diversity, open access, and research transparency

The results show overwhelming US and European dominance, not surprisingly. And male dominance, which is more extreme among editors in chief, across all disciplines.

During the pandemic year of 2020, thousands of US parents named their babies Kobe and Gianna

And a few other highlights. Data from the Social Security Administration show that the names Kobe and Gianna had the greatest increase in popularity of any names in the country in 2020; as Kobe boys increased from 499 to 1500 and Gianna girls from 3408 to 7826. Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in…

Why you’ll never establish the existence of distinct “generations” in American society

We're not going to find a set of fixed divisions that works across arenas -- such as social attitudes, family behavior, and economic status.

A little ‘generation’ debunking data exercise

One example of the pitfalls of Pew's "generations," using environmental attitudes.

Open letter to the Pew Research Center on generation labels

I posted a draft of this, with a discursive preamble, yesterday. To see all the posts on generations, here's the tag. Sign the letter here. We are demographers and other social scientists, writing to urge the Pew Research Center to stop using its generation labels (currently: Silent, Baby Boom, X, Millennial, Z). We appreciate Pew’s…