Three millennia ago, King Solomon wrote that “folly is bound up in the heart of a child.” It has ever been thus: the rueful old lament the apparent decadence of the young. In her new book Generations, social scientist Jean Twenge suggests an obvious explanation for this ageless trend: “It might be because they [are] always right. With technology making life progressively less physically taxing, each generation is softer…”
Twenge posits what she calls a “Technology Model of Generations.” She rejects the cyclical theory popularized in the 1990s by William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose model emphasized the defining influence of major events on generational identity. In their four-stage cyclical model, for example, the dual crises of the Great Depression and Second World War shaped the collectively-minded generation which built the strong institutions of America’s mid-century consensus. These were the “joiners” from whose participatory spirit Robert Putnam famously traced subsequent civic decline in Bowling Alone.
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