Review: In ‘Generations,’ the psychologist returns with a look at all living American cohorts, from the Silents to Gen Z and beyond
Twenge has been on the generations beat for three decades — and three books. Her first taste came in 1993, when she was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, studying gender differences. She gave out a questionnaire called the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and noticed that the women who took it were scoring very differently on traits related to assertiveness compared with their 1970s counterparts; they were much more likely, for example, to describe themselves as “leaders.
of “iGen,” how often have you actually heard someone say “I love me”? It turned out, Quinn wrote, that there had been no rising incidence of the more natural phrase: “I love myself.”Twenge has also been accused of overemphasizing the effects of technology at the expense, for example, of economic explanations. The Marxist writer Malcolm Harris called her “profoundly incurious” about the deeper economic dynamics at play when it came to the malaise of young American adults.
It is by now a cliche to describe their successors, the baby boomers, as the generation that launched the cult of the self. They were the first kids brought up on television, targeted by advertisements directly in their living rooms, whose values would shift so unapologetically toward the individualistic, the cultural mode we still accept as our default today.
Yet in trying to understand why, Twenge unearthed an economic pattern that surprised her. “The data on the income, on median incomes, is extremely clear: The millennials are actually making more money than previous generations at the same age,” she said. “That’s very counter to the narrative around stagnant wages and being broke and that they’re never going to earn as much as their parents. They’re actually earning more.
. “The number of teens with clinical-level depression doubled between 2011 and 2020,” she writes. “There is a full-blown mental health crisis among young people, and it was building long before the covid-19 pandemic.”And if, as Twenge argues, the proliferation of internet-enabled devices is the defining factor in Gen Z’s profile — and
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