Letters To The Editor

American Demographics,  Oct 1, 2004  

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GENERATION ISSUES

I read American Demographics avidly back when I was in marketing research and recently re-subscribed to to catch up on demographic trends that impact my clients. I applaud and respect your commitment to valid sampling and research design methodology.

But can your magazine please impose a more standard definition of currently active generations on its contributing authors? I have received four issues in my new subscription so far, and have seen multiple issues where several articles used substantially different start and end year breaks for Gen X and Gen Y. Some of the articles went so far as to call age cohorts as small as five years "generations." As a result, I am moved to protest.

Authors, Read Strauss and Howe, please. Their book Generations reads like a textbook, but their methodology for defining generational breakpoints as cataclysmic world and social events is compelling. In 1991, they defined the Boom as 1943-1960 (18 years) and Gen X as 1961-1980 (20 years), with the endpoint of Gen X fuzzy since we were short of cataclysmic events or truly strong social movements at the time. I can't really argue with 1960/61 as the breakpoint between the Boom and Gen X. Being born in 1963, I have no strong memory of Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, race riots, hippies or Woodstock. I was not influenced by those social movements or national events, nor was any person of my age that I know.

With 9/11, I believe we may have a defining generational breakpoint. Using the Strauss and Howe methodology, I would like to propose 1961-1978 as Gen X (18 years), with 1979 as a clearer beginning of Gen Y. These kids would have been getting out of college in 2001, and their first adult experiences are being shaped by the "Dubya" recession and as enlisted men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their sergeants and managers are Gen Xers. The earliest reasonable endpoint of Gen Y is 18 years later, placing it around 1997. This would mean that the youngest cohort of Gen Y to really understand and be influenced by 9/11 and subsequent events fall in the 5- to 8-year-old age cohort, which seems reasonable to me.

LYNNE MYSLIWIEC Vice President, Analytics Epsilon Data Management Wakefield, Mass.

Editors' note

Our generations are demarcated by changes in the number or the rate of births. For example, the dividing line between the Baby Boom and Gen X is 1964, the first year that the number of births fell below 4 million in the 1960s. We do try to have our contributing writers follow our guidelines, but the wide range of data sources they use sometimes don't match our age groupings.

FORESIGHT, IN HINDSIGHT

I had two reactions to "Foresight is 20/20" (American Demographics, July/August):

*

This collection of essays was founded on an excellent editorial idea that resulted in many thoughts as to what our future may hold. People are thinking.

*

But the writing. Oh, dear. Spencer and Holdrich, I thought, wrote quite decently. But the others - for people back up by serious degrees, important universities, published books, and considerable maturity - may be ranked C- to abyssal. (There was a lot of abyssal.) And I do not refer primarily to such picayune details as Commas: Too Many or Too Few, and Where? What bothers me most is abundant failures in sentence logic: awkward transitions, inappropriate conjunctions, run-on sentences, illogical juxtaposition of ideas, sentences compounded in ungrammatical ways. Most of your contributors are authors; writing should be a professional tool for them. Yet they do not know how to use it. When reading their pieces, I hurried unduly through their ideas because their writing made my teeth hurt. My colleagues who read "20/20" agreed with me. We are not editors or masters of English, merely cams in the bureaucracy of county government. This suggests that your guests underperformed their audience.

MATTHEW FLANNERY New Brunswick, N.J.

Editors' note

Each profile was made up of "sound bites" from our interviews with the futurists. This is particularly important to note, as how people speak usually differs from how they write. While this detail was originally included in the introduction to the article, it was unfortunately omitted before going to press. We apologize for the omission.

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