A little ‘generation’ debunking data exercise

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

The changing household age range, U.S. 1900-2017

One way to understand daily interaction, and intergenerational resource exchange, is just to look at the structure of households. This doesn't tell you everything that goes on in households, but it gives some strong clues. And we can measure it going back more than a century, thanks to IPUMS.org's collection of Census microdata. In 1900,…

Philip Cohen at 50, having been 14 in 1981

14-year-old me is never going to believe this.

Births to 40-year-olds are less common but a greater share than in 1960

Never before have such a high proportion of all births been to women over 40 -- they are now 2.8% of all births in the US. And yet a 40-year-old woman today is one-third less likely to have a baby than she was in 1947. From 1960 to 1980, birth rates to women over 40* fell,…

The U.S. government asked 2 million Americans one simple question, and their answers will shock you

Why don't they just tell us how old they really are? There must be a reason.