Jean Twenge’s New Book Takes Readers on a Data-Driven Tour of Six Living Generations

Jean M. Twenge is the scholar who introduced us to Millennials in Generation Me (2006) and Gen Z in iGen (2017). The defining feature of her work is that she doesn’t rely on mere generational stereotypes—she mines long-running surveys to sort out how each new crop of young people truly differs from the last.

And yet, as often as not, her findings tend to align with the patterns we all notice in everyday life. Stereotypes, after all, can be rooted in some semblance of truth. And while generational cutoffs are arbitrary, people born around the same time do share a common set of experiences and, to an extent, psychological traits as well.

Now Twenge is back with Generations, which, rather than debuting the next round of young adults, covers the lives and traits of all the living generations to reach adulthood: Silents (born 1925 to 1945), Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1979), Millennials (1980-1994), and Gen Z (1995-2012). For good measure, Twenge also takes a stab at naming the next one—she goes with “Polars,” a combination of “polarization” and “polar ice caps” that seems highly unlikely to capture the cohort’s essence when they start hitting adulthood in a decade or so, but we’ll see—and makes some predictions.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies

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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

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