Exposing Generational Myths

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How does when you were born shape who you are? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Professor Bobby Duffy at King's College London. Professor Duffy has a powerful new book called The Generation Myth, and in today's conversation, we explore his research in generational differences and how it can help us better understand what the future may look like. We also discuss why much of today's popular ideas around generational differences are mostly superficial stereotypes that miss the majority of what's actually happening among generations. So let's get started with Professor Bobby Duffy. In recent decades, it's been very popular to classify people according to their generation. And today, as you well know, we've got Gen Z, we've got Millennials, we've got Gen X, Baby Boomers, And finally, we've got the pre-World War II generation. But it seems like a lot of the research that we've seen in recent decades has been maybe more superficial, maybe more focused on marketers and journalists and consultants. You have a new book here called The Generation Myth, and you're suggesting that a lot of that research is actually missing the mark. So I'd love for you to start by setting some context, maybe some historical perspective here on this study of generations, and then what has some of your research discovered?

Great. Thank you. I think if you were trying to sum up the book in one sentence, it's that generational thinking is an incredibly important, powerful idea that has been horribly corrupted by terrible stereotypes, myths, and clichés built on superficial research, as you say. And I think it's a real shame because the history of generational thinking in sociology and philosophy is really important. It was, it's a big idea that, you know, very famous important philosophers like Auguste Comte actually think that, thought that generational change, the difference between generations is perhaps the key aspect in the speed with which societies change and develop because we get quite set in our ways past a certain age. And you need new generations coming through that are different from previous generations, have different mindsets in order to keep society from going stale. So these are really big ideas built on really important facts around we're born, we live and we die, and we're replaced by the next generations. And that your formative experiences in your more malleable teens and early 20s are really important in shaping your attitudes and behaviors. And so that helps society move on. But what we get instead of that are all these very shallow myths and clichés around things like millennials have killed the wine cork industry, or, well, you could fill a whole discussion here about things millennials are supposed to have killed on the basis of really shallow clichéd research. It's a real shame. And I think what the job of the book is, is to try and separate the myths from the realities in order to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. These generational labels are getting a really bad name as entirely superficial when actually used properly, they do tell you something really important about society and how it's changing.

And so in your research, you actually identified 3 separate factors that have a big impact on what it means to be part of a generation. So explore that for us a little bit, if you would, please.

Yeah, there's effectively just 3 explanations to how societies and individuals in some senses change over time. First of all, you do have these cohort effects, as the academics would call it. So that is where a generation is different and stays different from other generations. There's something about when they were brought up that helped shape their attitudes and behaviors, and that stays with them. So our relationship with religion is very cohort-based and very generational-based because what was the norm when you were growing up shapes your views of connections to religion to, on average, across society, and that sticks with you. To some degree. But then you also have life cycle effects, which are we do change as we age and go through different life stages. And they're really important too. They are very powerful effects as you leave home, get married, have kids, get your first job or retire. All of those types of things affect our attitudes and behaviors. And you can see clear signs of that too. There is some truth in the cliché about us being liberal in our 20s and conservatives in our 30s. There is an element of you change to a more traditional mindset relative to others as you age. And then thirdly, there are period effects, which typically you can think of them as, you know, very important events like a financial crisis or a war or a pandemic in our case today that affect everyone, that happen and affect everyone to some sort of degree. They can also be slower evolutionary change in cultural norms or behaviors across certain societies. Those period effects, what's actually happening right now, The context right now is important too. And really all the change that we see in society is a blend of those different types of effects. It's never just one thing or the other, but you can see some effects are more important on some things than other things. So the job at heart is to try to separate out those three types of effects to try to understand what's really going on, what's really changing. And I think that the reason that's really crucial is because if we are seeing true cohort effects, so generations are truly different from each other, that's really important to identify because older generations are dying out, being replaced by younger generations. So if you want to understand the future, if there really are true differences between generations, then knowing what they are is really important for now, but also understanding what comes next.

And a lot of the research, the popular research that we hear about, we hear the marketers and the consultants talking about I think your book is saying that that's actually only focusing on one of these three aspects. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. When you try to sum up whole generations, whole vast swathes of the population, for example, saying millennials are materialistic or lazy or baby boomers are selfish, which is quite a lot of this type of analysis, you're overgeneralizing and forgetting all these other types of effects. And quite often what is going on is people are mixing up life cycle and cohort effects. So taking that materialism point as an example, it is true that young people tend to be more materialistic in survey questions. They tend to say things like, it's more important what I own, or I want to be rich. But young people always say that. When you start to look at this generationally rather than just by age groups, you can see that each generation comes into society saying, I want to be rich, or I want to— more likely to say that than the rest of the population. But as they age, that slowly trails away. So this is really more of a life cycle effect where young people tend to be focused on that and then tend to grow out of it as they get older. But the mistake that is often made is then saying this snapshot of young people today represents millennials or Gen Z for the rest of their lives, and they're going to be utterly different. If you don't see it as a blend of generational life cycle and period effects, you'll be constantly ascribing characteristics to generations that will be more due to their age or the context at that time, the period effect at that time.

[Speaker:GUY_SPIER] There's a book that you mentioned in your book called The Fourth Turning. It talks about four different— they call them turnings. I think it's essentially like every 20 years or so, different things happen because of the generations. Now, you have some thoughts on that book and that thinking, so I'd love to maybe compare and contrast what your research has found versus what Strauss and Howe, who are the authors of that book, what they found.

Yeah, I mean, it's a very— the series of books on generations that Strauss and Howe wrote are really compelling, interesting outlines of different generational contexts and fascinating to read. I think I think the issue is that they fall into that trap of effectively they say that there are 4 types of generations that repeat in the same order throughout American history. They focus on, and these 4 types create different, the combination of the 4 types of generations being at different ages create 4 types of conditions in society at that time with one generation reacting to the character of another generation. So I mean, from my perspective, I think there's a few issues with that. One is the evidence for there being four consistent types of generations that repeat throughout history, their kind of characteristics, or is pretty weak. And these are very difficult things to evidence, but there are certainly examples where the evidence that we do have now doesn't seem to hold up. So for example, they talked about millennials were gonna come into the population as an incredibly civic generation. As they characterized it, where their voter turnout levels would take everyone by surprise and they would be incredibly politically engaged. And I think we can see that that's not something that millennials would particularly recognize about themselves. It's not what the data particularly shows about their voting level. So I think while it's really interesting and compelling to read these really big picture predictions, that are based on these fundamental movements in the types of people that are in society is too broad brush, I think, for it to be useful as a predictive tool and not held up well from the evidence. And I think in the book I talk about there are other risks in that model where you think there is an inevitability of generational types coming through. It takes away that sense of agency. Between the generations, within the generations and between them, that we can actually create our own future. So in particular, they were predicting a crisis in the 2010s or 2020s because every 80 years there is what they call the fourth turning where you get this crisis and reset in society. And I think that's dangerous in a sense. It doesn't particularly hold up against historical analysis of when these crises happen, but it's also dangerous in the sense that it gives a sense there's nothing we can do but go through this crisis. We're heading towards a crisis and there's nothing that people can do to avoid it. And some people have used that for political ends in saying, we're heading towards a crisis, we may as well embrace it. I worry about that because I think there's much more that we can do to shape futures through our actions than that implies. We have more agency than that implies.

If we think about what's happening today, so we've got the pandemic, We've got rapid technology change happening as well. As you've done your research and think about maybe those two variables, are those big enough things that might impact how you think about your generational thinking? And as you try and project into the future— I know we can't predict the future— but as you think about your research, your model, your way of thinking about generations, and those two big variables which might be Maybe you consider those period effects because they're going to affect all generations to some extent. How might those two variables interact in terms of how you think about what may happen in the future?

That's a really good question. And technology and the pandemic are really interesting examples of this. Taking technology first, it's really important in generational identity and formation and the relations between generations. And that's kind of in this generational thinking from the beginning of our kind of current understanding of generations, which you can trace back to people like Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, who was writing at the beginning of the 20th century. And for him, technology was really important in generational formation and identities, but for a particular reason. It was shortly after the Industrial Revolution, there was still a lot of technological progress in the economy. And his point was that the speed of technological change then, which was very fast, was giving younger people an advantage over older people, or rather it was decreasing the advantage of older people because their skills were no longer that useful for the new economy. So he had a very economic view of the importance of technology. And I think that is really important when you have fast-moving technologies. It actually changes the balance of power between young and old. If that's really central to the economy. What I think is less compelling on technology is you see a lot of failed attempts at summing up generations in relation to one particular social media platform or one even games console. So, you know, there was supposed to be a Nintendo generation that this was going to have a lasting impact that would mark out a generation. So I think we need to be mindful that technology is not just who's on TikTok or who is using Snapchat or playing computer games. It is much more embedded into big things like economic outcomes. And that's where technology is really important, I think, in generational aspects. On the pandemic, it's a really, again, really important point is yes, the pandemic is a massive period effect. It's like a black swan event. Taleb would describe it. This is something that you didn't particularly see coming, not in the form that it is now. And it affects everyone to some degree, but it's also really important where you are in your life cycle, depending on the effect it has on you. And we can kind of get that intuitively, that people who are in education have had an incredibly disrupted education experience in some cases. And those who are at the beginning of their career and just starting their first jobs are more vulnerable because they tend to be in less established positions. And equally, at the other end of the age spectrum, there's a lot more evidence now that the pandemic has pushed older people out of the workforce for good, that they kind of lost their, their roles, and they're finding it really hard to re-enter the work market right now. So while the pandemic affects everyone, when you were born and then your current age as a result of that is still really important in how you've experienced it. So I do think Looking across all the things that I've seen and experienced in 20 years of looking at these generations, the pandemic is what Mannheim and the other great thinkers on this would really recognize as a generational shaping event because of that, because it's going to affect those in their formative years more than other groups in it. His great focus on generations was because of the First World War, really related to that, that sense that a younger generation was sacrificed by an older generation in this war and the anger that created. And I think COVID is as close as we've come to in my lifetime and looking at this to a proper potential generational event where you could have real signs of Generation COVID in the future, not just on economic things, but on the impact on mental health, socialization, all these knock-on effects of having a crisis that's gone on now for 2 years now.

Yeah, and then you look at technology, COVID, and then let's go back to 2008, 2009 with the great economic crisis. So there's a generation there that maybe on the young end got hit by the economic crisis and saw what was happening with their parents. And then 12 years later, they get hit with COVID So any sense for how you would think about, again, financial services? A lot of people talk about the impact of the Great Economic Recession. In terms of how that affected a generation, their attitudes toward investing. So any sense for the impact of the economic crisis coupled with COVID coupled with politics? I mean, there's a lot in the mix here that's very combustible. How do you think about the next 10 years?

I'll start from the beginning of that really, which was, yes, the 2008 financial crisis. Before the pandemic, that was the event that I was talking about. In my research for generations as the generation-forming or affecting event, because it's just absolutely clear that where you were in your life cycle affected the impact on you. You can kind of see, I use these charts that plot trends by generation, not by age group. So you can kind of plot your own generation, follow your own generation through different financial outcomes. And so I'm Gen X and you can kind of track my Gen X line on home ownership, for example, where it looked like 70 to 80% of baby boomers in the pre-war generation owned their own home. It like Gen X were just drifting up, just going up to meet them at a similar sort of level until 2003, '04, the house price booms and then the subsequent crash. And it just deflects that Gen X line away from the path that it looked like it was going to follow. So ended up with more like 60% Gen X owning their own home rather than 70 or 80%. And then millennials never get going really, down at 40% and sort of creeping up now. But for years and years, incredibly different experience of home ownership based purely really on when they were born. They could have been born into the same socioeconomic circumstances and have a much higher chance of home ownership if they'd just been born 10 years earlier. So yeah, generations really, when you were born, really important to the impact of financial crisis on people. And I agree that incredibly unlucky couple of younger generations coming through in millennials and Gen Z to have this still at relatively early periods of their careers. Millennials are getting older now clearly, but still quite a few of them that are in their early 30s and et cetera. So it's still a really bad combination of things. And I think the key thing for me in this is yes, the impact on individuals is really, really important, but it's also our collective sense of the chances of a better future for young people that has been really hit. So in, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, depending on where you're looking, US or UK, there was a sense that the future could and will be better for young people than it was for their parents. Still, there was that, that kind of sense. But in, since then, in both the US and the UK, That's reversed. So now we've got barely a quarter of people who think that young people today will have a better future than their parents, and half thinking it's going to be worse, roughly. There's an opposite pattern to that in the late 1990s or early 2000s. And I think when you think about that, that's quite extraordinary that now with all the progress that we've had, all of the continuing objective progress in lots of areas of life, that we actually think the world is going to be worse for our kids than it is for us. And I think that has really important implications for how we see the system, how we see democracy and the economy working for us or against us. And so I think the big picture point is about that shaking the faith in the system. And that could well be related to the types of behaviors that you're talking about, which are more risky or rejectionist of the system or trying to create a new system. I think that comes from that sense of actually it's not really working for us, for many of us anymore. It hasn't been working for us for 20 years or longer now. So you start to— it's no surprise really that people will come up with more radical approaches to that, to financial issues in those types of circumstances. I would say this is where again, I don't particularly subscribe to the fourth turning point because this is brought on by a novel coronavirus that came from the Wuhan district of China. This is not something related to the characteristics of generations, which is the thesis from Strauss and Howe that it's the combination of these generational types that creates this crisis. It's not to do with that. This is to do with something completely random that happens somewhere else. And actually, you should be looking at that broader sense of what do these types of crises make us feel about the direction of society overall? Because this is not just one generation pushing against this. This is a loss of faith in the system across age groups, partly because it really matters to me as a parent whether my kids have a better future ahead of them than we did. And that it's not just the young people who are questioning it, it is all of us question it because we're deeply connected up and down the generations.

Well, there's a lot to work with there. So let me throw out maybe a big question and you take it where you want to go. So we've got the economic crisis, we've got the rise of Trump in the United States, we've got Brexit in the UK, we've got COVID. How do you think the generations in power affect the rise of Trump here, Brexit in the UK, and then the response to COVID? Like, take COVID, for example. Is it predictable that the generation that's in power, which is, I would argue, at least here in the US, is an older generation, might have a generationally predictable response to how we would deal with a pandemic? Has that affected things? And then again, you know, Trump and Brexit, you know, this is not a political show,. But I'm just interested in all the different dynamics and maybe how your research in generational thinking might help us put a frame on some of these big issues that are happening in our respective countries.

And I think absolutely the age profile of leaders and electorates are really important in these types of responses. And it, but it really does stem from age profile of electorates as well. So it is undoubtedly the case that the baby boomer generation had a double advantage in their political influence, which is first, there was a baby boom. So there was a big cohort of people. So it was a surge in the population. Some economists thought it's actually bad to be part of a big cohort. Some very respected economists thought it'd be bad to be part of a big cohort because there'd be more competition for resources. Actually turned be very good to be part of the big cohort for creating demand and all of those types of things, but also definitely your importance to political power because you are a big electorate. And then the second effect for baby boomers is they come from a time where voting was more expected and more of a duty. So their turnout levels are higher than generations that have come since. And that's still the case, even though the gap has closed a bit, but they still have this double advantage of being big demographically and big at the election in terms of their turnout levels. So that inevitably pulls political interests towards them. It pulls the political agenda towards their interests. And you can see that very clearly in both the US and the UK. There's a whole series of decisions that have been made over the past decades that have favored that that cohort in particular, and now, which is an older cohort, we had a lot of protection of the housing market, for example, who were owners, are much more likely to be from that older cohort. There's been all sorts of changes in welfare benefits in the UK and the support that young people get declining while pensions have been protected or actually increased in many ways. So yes, undoubtedly the case that having a generational perspective on not just attitudes, but also what is happening to policy, and then particularly in, in the economy and on financial aspects, is undoubtedly the case that being in one cohort, particularly the baby boomers, has been more helpful than being in smaller cohorts and ones that vote less. So that's, I would say, that's the key mechanism rather than the age of the leaders themselves that has been the focus. It's more about the calculation, the electoral calculus of who do we need to appeal to in order to win elections? And it's very, very hard in lots of countries now to have an appeal that is mainly for younger people because of that demographic and voting power. And obviously that will continue for quite a while because baby boomers are a healthier generation in many ways than previous generations. So they have more healthy life years in order to keep voting. So yes, I think that is the key dynamic, I would say.

One of the other things you talked about in your book is a rise in individualism in different countries. And I wanna maybe equate that with say Bitcoin, for example. A lot of people that are into Bitcoin are like, I've lost faith in the Federal Reserve. I've lost faith in institutions. I don't want people to know what I do with my money. So any thoughts on how we should think about generations in things like the rise of individualism, maybe the interest in Bitcoin and similar crypto assets like that?

Yeah, I think it's a really important trend in this. There's a slow but relentless drift to individualism across lots of countries, partly because of political actions that have pushed more of that type of approach where shrinking of the state, pre-pandemic, of course, shrinking of the state, and giving people more, more control across different sort of aspects of life, or putting more responsibility on, on individuals to look after particular aspects of their life. That has been a long-term trend. But the one thing that could be useful to bear in mind in service provision, financial services and others, is this reflects a kind of a long-term values shift in the population from What one academic, Shalom Schwartz, talks about, and Ron Inglehart in the US, is it's a move from survival values to self-expression values. Over time, we've seen countries across the world drifting from survival values, which is that sense of the government focusing on the basics of law and order and economic necessities and those types of things where, but as economic growth has happened and those material circumstances have improved, people have been able to move more to self-expression values, which are more about individual identities and tolerance for others and all those types of things. And I think the key point about that is a fragmentation of different interests or requirements from the market or from culture. And that is both the opportunity and the challenge, I guess, from that drift to self-expression. Obviously, if you're more and more free to express your own individual identity and in different sorts of ways and different spheres of life, then you're going to get myriad more identities expressed by people. So it's going to be a more fragmented market and more niche markets all across different aspects of life because people will be attempting to be truer to themselves, being more tolerant of difference, all of those types of things. So when I look at these sorts of trends more from a implications for a business point of view is that sense of an explosion of variety of different types of needs, different, and those identities driving those types of needs. And that's again, I think, you know, very relevant to the cryptocurrency point of view, very relevant to all sorts of other trends like data unions where people are trying to monetize their personal data. A greater sense of this is my individual data, that I own this data, and we need to be paid for the use of that type of data. As you can see, yeah, that fragmentation and self-expression, really important. And it makes it— well, two sides to that, obviously, is it opens up lots of different, a variety of different sorts of opportunities for businesses and suppliers, but it also makes it quite complicated and fragmented as we drift in different sorts of directions.

I want to tie back into technology again here for a moment. So we tend to think that in today's day and age, technology is rapidly accelerating. We've never been in another period in history where technology has advanced as fast as it is today. Well, because that's like our only perspective. We don't know what it was like back in the Industrial Revolution and whatnot. So, so we kind of have this perspective. I think it's also pretty clear that to stay up with technology is very difficult. How do you think older generations need to be viewing technology and staying up with technology so that they don't get surpassed by the younger generation?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it starts with your first point again, is it's really important to recognize that throughout history we often feel like technology is exploding and expanding much quicker than we can cope with. There's this kind of constant sense that we're going too fast. So Walter Lippmann talked about that at the beginning of the 20th century in the US, is that we're changing the environment quicker than we can cope with as individuals, was his kind of— his take on it. So you can find that throughout history. So it is important to recognize that every period of history will always feel like technology is moving too fast for us. And in some ways, that's the kind of inevitability of growing older within a society. In some ways, you'd be worried if older people weren't struggling to keep up with NFTs, et cetera. I struggle to keep up with it. I don't understand NFTs, for example. So you'd be worried if that wasn't the case, because then it would probably be a signal that society isn't changing fast enough in some ways, and we are stagnating. So there's an inevitability and also even a healthiness in older generations feeling a bit confused or left out by the new technology. You need to kind of start with that as a base point, I think, of not to be too worried or think that it's too different from the past. Having said that, I mean, I do think there is something qualitatively different about right now, and this may be my own biases because it's impossible to take yourself completely out of your own time. But the way in which technology has the speed and reach of technology, speed of adoption, and then reach into all aspects of life that technology has today does feel qualitatively different. It does, you know, you will have academic arguments that say that it is qualitatively different from the past because of that reach and speed. There is something there that, as I say, that makes, in Mannheim's understanding of generations, he saw the speed of technological change as one of the key aspects of how generations are formed. If you've got very slow-moving technology, then you've got weaker generational identities. If you have moving technology, you're going to have stronger splits between the generations than you would have in that slower environment. So he would have us in this sort of environment as, yes, generational thinking is more important now, and generational identities are going to get more important now. There is a caveat on that, is because he also said if technology is changing so fast you can't actually get any generational identities because, you know, something new comes along and it changes everything again. And I think we've got a little bit of that going on now in our environment, as soon as something is adopted, there's a new thing that is coming that is also really important, and even relatively young people are struggling to keep up with that. So it does make generational thinking more important, particularly if you take that frame to it. Slow technological change means generational identities are probably not that important. Fast means they're very important, but too fast means that it can fracture those generational identities. And I think we are probably closer to that very fast environment now where actually being in a particular cohort is not an advantage for very long. Because the next thing will be coming along quite soon. But for older people, I guess people in my generation, I think the advice is first of all, not to be too worried about it, not to think that it's too unusual that we would feel unsettled by this. That's how it should be. But secondly, that it is really important to try to engage with these types of trends. This is not something that you can ignore as someone from the older cohort because it is affecting society as a whole. These are period effects that each cohort has to engage with.

Yeah, and I'm old enough that when I was in college, I was actually coding using punch cards.

Yes.

And I think about that technology to where we are today. It's like we're always in a state of becoming as it relates to technology. And if you just close your eyes for 6 months or a year, man, things are just going to pass you by. So I can't reiterate strongly enough of how important it is just to stay up with the tech, even though it can be difficult. Maybe along those lines, let's talk about the workplace, because that's a big issue that people in business have to deal with. And I hear it all the time when I'm working with advisors about the younger generation, the millennials, they're just, they don't want to work, they're not loyal. So do you see that in your research? Is, let's say, the millennial generation, are they that different from previous generations at that age? And maybe any thoughts on how we should think about leadership in the workplace. Should we— let's say I'm a baby boomer leader. Should I be treating a millennial or a Gen X differently than someone else? Are the distinctions between those generations that different that I need to be treating them so much differently? Because again, we hear a lot of consultants who make a lot of money telling business leaders, you need to treat a millennial this way and a Gen X that way. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head with your last comment about there's a lot of consultants and trainers who will tell you that there are big differences, and that motivation to sell you a solution to something is a really important part of this dynamic. Because I, looking across the research on workplace-based generational differences, the academic research shows there's just about none of any note that are truly generational. Obviously, young people do want something different from work than middle-aged people and then older people, but that's always been the case. And there is just about no evidence that there's really big differences between generations that is to do with that cohort alone. Really, the more important effects here are life cycle effects of how old you are and where you are in your career, and period effects about what's changing generally in the environment. So things like the claims that millennials or Gen Z are particularly focused on brand purpose or the values of an organization, it doesn't seem to be a generational effect at all. It's much more period effect where we've all got an increased interest in what does my organization want to achieve and are they authentic to their values? So yes, I mean, I think this is in, in the book, it's probably the worst area of charlatan-like claims of difference. It's a little bit to do with that point of there is money to be made in this. There is definitely a fear among executives that they lose touch with younger generations and they are looking for solutions to that. And people are very willing to exaggerate a problem in order to sell you a solution. To that problem, that made-up problem. So there's lots of mechanisms by which that happens. We do have faulty memories about how we were in our past. We forget the bad things from our own past, and we forget that we were also annoying and entitled when we came into the workplace and put it onto a cohort rather than just young people being quite energetic and pushy about themselves. And then some of the myths are just made up around laziness, no particular evidence of that, or lack of loyalty increasing. Again, there's a very clear life cycle effect. Young people do tend to change jobs more often, but that's always been the case. And actually, when you look at the data, it's older people who are moving jobs more often than older people did in the past because of the change in types of work environments that we're in now. So yes, there's a whole hodgepodge of myths and exaggerated differences that quite often mix up life cycle and period and cohort effects in the wrong sort of way. So yeah, be very cautious, I would say. And on that point of, you know, should you be treating people differently according to their generations? I think no is the answer. You should be looking at where they are in their life cycle and life stage, and you should be looking at what's going on generally. But I think the other risk here a little bit in this consultancy and training is it sort of puts the problem onto the generation rather than the employer. So you've got this sense of saying it's not my fault that we have a problem with engagement as an employer with young people. It's because millennials are lazy or entitled, or Gen Z are disloyal, or whatever it is, when actually the organization should be looking at themselves, not trying to utter this problem by saying it's not us, it's them. And I think that's a risk here. It's very tempting to say we're doing our best but this is a weird generation. There's nothing we can do.

Well, let's wrap up by talking about everybody's favorite subject, sex. And the reason why I want to talk about that is you do address that in your book, and there's been some talk that maybe there's a sex recession among the younger generation, perhaps, in that as we look at birth rates around the world, that part of economic growth is a function of what are the birth rates and death rates, and is that a positive there. So what are your thoughts on how sex plays in through generations here, and does that perhaps foretell future birth rates here in terms of how that might impact economic growth in the future?

It's a really important trend for society, for society overall, and for the economy about what is actually happening to our birth rates. And I think the, the problem with the sex recession headlines and analysis is a couple of things. It first of all suggests that this is something that goes up and down like the economy might, where it goes recession and then a bit of a boom. And then when actually the trend is pretty firmly down in terms of birth rates over time, there is hard to see it bouncing back in some sort of sense. Second point is it's often assigned to this is a problem with Gen Z or with millennials that have created this when actually the decline in birth rates started baby boomers and into Gen X. This is a long-term trend where we can't just point at one generation. The decline in birth rates has been going on for quite a while through, you know, all sorts of positive things like women's rights and higher education levels and etc., etc., kind of all associated with this. But it's not down to one recent generation. This is a long-term effect. And it's the same, same with actual sexual activity. To some degree, it is a similar sort of pattern of declining over time. And interestingly, things like millennials, it was more that they had delayed start to their sex life than a recession in their sex lives. They just have grown slower. So delayed adulthood is a really key element of this for millennials and for Gen Z. So, but yes, the long-term nature of this, the multifaceted nature of this, that is not going to be not just one generation that is responsible for this is really important to understand because all the interventions that people have tried to turn this around around the world, very significant policy and economic interventions in places like Japan, encouraging people to have more children, that really is a truly aging society there, have not had much effect. This is going against really big tides increasing education levels and sense of control for women. And it's very difficult to see an increase in this. I think what we will need to do instead is just try to adapt to this different population profile that we're going to have, which is a really tough thing to do. But I think recognizing that reality rather than blaming it on fluffy trend among one particular generation is a really important thing to do.

Yeah, and China, obviously they've got a big issue as well. I mean, they lifted the one-child policy, some time ago, but they're still not having a lot more babies over there. So I know that's an issue for them. So this has been great, Bobby. Let's go ahead and wrap up here. I'd love for you, if you have any final thought, to add that, but then also tell us about what's the best way for people to stay in touch with you.

Yeah, no, there's been great conversation. Thank you, Steve. Really good questions. And I think this frame of thinking is really useful across different sectors, business and finance, as well as the policy and politics. It's been great to talk it through from that type of angle. Pick up the book wherever you can. There is a website that's just generations.org if you wanted to have a look at for a bit more detail on some of the trends that I look at where you can have a little browse before, and it's got links to some of the news pieces and reviews of the book. And yeah, do keep in touch on Twitter. I will be tweeting bits of analysis as I do it about generational differences.

Excellent. All right. Well, Bobby, I really appreciate you taking some time here today. Congratulations on a great new book. I really enjoyed reading it and It's covered in yellow. So I have lots of highlights in it.

So thank you. That's great. Thank you, Steve.

My key takeaway from my conversation with Professor Duffy is understanding that there are 3 main factors that affect the behavior of a generation. We have period effects, the lifecycle effect, and the cohort effect. And once you realize that all societal change is explained by a combination of these these three effects, then we have a framework for a deeper understanding of where we are now and what is likely to come next. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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