Millennials have been reported to be not just a new generation but a different generation. A Homo Novus generation. Some of the stereotypes or tropes have been that they are:
More caringThe list could go on. Of course not all millennials on all these things but, the story goes, most millennials on most these things.
More tolerant
More interested in diversity
More inclined towards city living
More disinclined to have or use cars
More tattooed
More committed to social justice
More dependent on cell phones for all their communication
More focused on experiences not material consumption
More ardent recyclers
Less committed to home ownership
Less familiar with social norms
Less motivated to work hard
Less respectful of hierarchies
Less tutored in manners
Part of this is the age old inclination of an older generation to label a younger one and to lament the decline in standards, norms and quality.
From a personal perspective though, I see consistent evidence for only two of these with any real frequency - the reduction of awareness of social norms and the dependence on cell phones for all forms of communication. But on the latter, that is part of a larger social trend; everyone is more dependent on smart phones. It is quite possible that we are only singling out millennials because they are the first generational cohort native to cell phones.
I have a different theory for the troping of millennials. But first Cox's report.
One trope, popularized by Richard Florida, but the banner advanced by most pundits, has been that millennials are flocking to cities where they work as creatives, socialize at coffee houses, postpone family formation and children, shun the suburbs and dispense with cars. This has been heralded as a beautiful and desirable future. As advertised at SNL
Double click to enlarge.
Among progressives, this future has been lauded as well as heralded. As their electoral becomes more selective, their base is cities and the young. They not only want this future to occur on ideological/moral grounds but they need to it to come to pass for electoral purposes.
But is it true? There has always been a skeptical group dubious of these claims. They pointed out that the genesis of many of these tropes occurred during the Great Recession which had large distorting affects on all generational cohorts. The skeptics argued that all we were seeing in these "trends" were shocks from the great recession on the cohort least financially prepared for it. They suggested that cities were not going to experience a major renewal and that the generational cohort behaviors would return to old patterns with the return of jobs and prosperity.
So which is it? A progressive Homo Novus in the cities or a brief interruption and then a return to consumption, family formation, cars, and suburbs?
Cox reports:
Economists at the Federal Reserve Board have published exhaustive research on Millennial spending patterns and generally find that they are similar to those of other generations (See: “Are Millennials Different?,” by Christopher Kurz, Geng Li, and Daniel J. Vine). The research examines Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey data and the conclusion is summarized by the authors:So the skeptics have it. Millennials are, with a good economy, beginning to look more and more like other cohorts at the same stage in their life-cycle.
“Using data on household spending from the CE survey, we find little evidence that millennial households have tastes and preference for consumption that are lower than those of earlier generations, once the effects of age, income, and a wide range of demographic characteristics are taken into account.”
The Dubious Narrative
All of this make come a surprise to the many analysts that imagined the Great Financial Crisis had produced a “sea-change” in American attitudes. It was theorized that there was an increasing interest in dense urban living and an expectation that Americans would abandon suburban living in large numbers. Some even suggested that people were less interested in using cars, especially Millennials.
Even as this narrative was forming and becoming more popular, however, there was not a single year in which the core counties of major metropolitan areas (those with populations over 1,000,0000) gained domestic migration from suburban counties. Transit’s modest ridership increases relative to the market continued, but even that has to come to an end in recent years. Since just after the Great Financial Crisis (2010), nearly 90 percent of population growth in the major metropolitan areas was in functionally suburban and exurban areas, and outside the urban core. The share of the major metropolitan population continued to increase over the past five years and is now over 85 percent (See: “Suburbs & Exurbs Dominate Metropolitan Growth at Mid-Decade”).
Even among Millennials, who the density boosters imagined were “flocking to the cities,” were exhibiting an only marginally smaller preference for the suburbs than their predecessors, with nearly 80 percent of their population increase in the suburbs (See: "Suburbs & Exurbs Dominate Mid-Decade Millennial Growth”). Only one-fifth of the Millennial population gain has been in the urban core.
Overall Consumption Patterns
The new economic research indicates that Millennial consumption behavior is consistent with the broader trends cited above.
The research examined consumption patterns by age from 1986, 2001 and 2016. Overall, controlling for age, income, employment and demographic patterns, the researchers found “no evidence that the generation-specific tastes and preferences of millennials favor lower levels of consumption than the tastes and preferences of members of other generations.” Moreover, they found that the changes in consumption shares by category are “very similar to the changes for the entire population,” and that “that there has not been a dramatic taste shift from one cohort to the next with respect to a particular form of consumption.”
In fact, the researchers conclude that Millennials have a higher taste for consumption than some older generations.
“That is, controlling for age, income, and an array of other characteristics that affect consumption, we see that Generation X members and baby boomers actually have a slightly lower taste for consumption than millennials.”Millennial Transportation Preferences
Perhaps the most often repeated “sea-change” narrative is related to automobiles, dating from the Great Financial Crisis. The authors make the point as follows:
“For example, Fortune cited the decline in the fraction of new vehicles purchased by young adults— defined as 18 to 34 year olds—as evidence that financial constraints for that age group had increased and their interest in driving had decreased. As quoted in the article, young adults “just don’t think driving is cool—or even necessary—anymore.” Similar stories abound and often attribute these changes to the rising popularity of social media, which reduces the need to travel, and alternative means of transportation, such as ride-sharing, public transportation, and biking, which reduces the need of owning a vehicle.”However:
“As the recovery gained steam it became less obvious that these patterns reflected generational preferences. Some press articles as early as 2012 started to note that younger buyers had begun looking increasingly like their older cohorts as their employment and income prospects improved.”As the authors indicate, “The share of new-vehicle purchases for young households dipped during the 2007–09 recession, but the shortfall was not particularly large, and the rate returned to its normal range after a few years.” Based on the 2016 data, the research concludes, with respect to both new and used vehicles:
“Importantly, we find no evidence that millennials have preferences for vehicle purchases that are lower than those of earlier generations.”
I have been deeply skeptical of Richard Florida's vision all along and read most the media cheerleading of that vision as wishful thinking rather than empirical reporting. The evidence for marked shifts in cohort behavior and culture has always been vestigial and now looks destroyed.
So why did this trope or portfolio of stereotypes gain steam? Was it emergent from the culture at large? Or the media? Because it is now appears clear that it wasn't reality.
I think it was primarily the media that pushed the trope but there was sufficient tactical parallel to what people were seeing and experiencing that it gained added momentum from the population for a while.
I think the story behind these millennial tropes is fairly complex but compelling, once considered. I think there was a convergence of five factors in a coincidental window of time which caused the portfolio of millennial tropes to gain traction: 1) Media financial collapse, 2) Increasing divergence between the Media/Academia/Political Mandarin Class and the rest of America, 3) the dethronement of the establishment political parties, 4) the onset of the Great Recession, and 5) the coincidence that Millennials are the first cohort to emerge from the new postmodernist education system of the late nineties and 2000s (especially in prestige universities.
Media Financial Collapse
Specifically I postulate that the mainstream media has a major incentive in pushing catastrophe/crisis/change narratives. It is a variant of "if it bleeds it leads." The mainstream media has been in financial free fall for two decades, in crisis due to technological disintermediation, to the collapse of their old ad-based business model, and to an increasing chasm between the worldviews of the Mandarin Class editors and reporters and the nation at large. This is most demonstrable in divergence between the party registrations of the media and academia versus the rest of America.
The consequence of this collapse has been the hollowing out of newspaper staff. I forget the numbers but I think mainstream media (TV and newspapers) are down 50-70% in headcount from their 1980s peak. Not only have they reduced numbers, they have shifted their employment mix. Gone are the crusty old full-time reporters. Now newsrooms are populated with the children of Ben Rhodes - 27-year olds who know literally nothing. Part-timers, stringers, opinion pieces, fluff pieces, interns, and press release journalism are all in and full-time journalists with decades of experience doing investigative reporting are out. Too expensive.
What better topic to champion and write about then than stories about the lives led by urban centered young people and how those live are a sea-change and herald of a new ideological urban based homo novus. Cheap to write, familiar to the 27 year olds within their urban newsroom cocoon.
Divergence of media worldviews from those of Americans
As the old mainstream media has retrenched into a few urban centers and as they have reconfigured their workforce into a younger and cheaper force, either deliberately or through inattention, it has become not only markedly cleansed of conservative voices and views, but has moved markedly leftward of the Democratic Party itself. Increasingly, it is only Democrats producing the news in the old mainstream media, but also the most left leaning of Democrats. That is not to say that there isn't right leaning news media. And I don't mean Fox and WSJ. While editorially they tend to be centrists or slightly right, their reporters and editors, based on surveys, appear to be nearly as left-leaning as their other mainstream brethren.
There is a continued blossoming of right-leaning media but none of them yet carry the weight of the old mainstream news producers. The numbers are just not there yet.
The consequence of this is that the mainstream media, with their young, inexperience and less knowledgeable reporters cocooned in their Democratic and left-progressive networks, needing to crises to report (such as mammoth societal changes) are especially prone to see the progressive homo novus of the cities as an established reality despite an absence of empirical evidence. It is confirmation bias writ large.
Dethronement of Establishment Parties
In America, across the OECD and even in advanced developing world countries, the old establishment parties have failed at serving their nations and are being thrown out by the electorates. Change is indeed in the air. Just not necessarily the change seen from urban bunkers by 27-year old journalism majors with minors in social justice.
In America, this revolt of the masses manifested initially in the early 2000s with the Tea Party Movement which gained steam during the Great Recession. The Tea Party effectively did a bumpy and spasmodic reverse takeover of the Republican establishment party. The Democratic establishment party now faces its own internal revolt with its Antifa, BLM, and Democratic Socialist wings making a play for the thrones of Pelosi and Schumer.
Whereas the Tea Party was pretty homogenous across age groups, the Antifa/BLM/Democratic Socialists are distinctly a party of young people (other than their titular icon). Plays into the millennials are different idea, even though that is a selective reading.
Onset of the Great Recession
Of course everyone's spending patterns changed, career patterns changed, etc. during the Great Recession. Millennials, with education debt, no jobs, little revenue and steeped in social media and new technology could easily be made to seem, over a five year window, to be something new when in fact, all they were doing was reacting to the exogenous shock of a collapsing economy.
The first postmodernist education cohort
All of the above factors were important for supporting and advancing the narrative of hipster millennial homo novii. However, I think there was just enough meat to the homo novii claim to make it credible for to many people for some time beyond its natural lifespan.
I would argue that what was distinct about Millennials was not that they were a new cohort with a different world view. No, they were the first cohort to have emerged from an education system permeated by postmodernist philosophy. Alan Bloom saw this coming in his Closing of the American Mind in the late 1980s. It has gathered steam since then. One track has been the takeover of education programs by postmodernist social justice jacobins thus influencing K-12 teachers coming through the pipeline. The second track has been the gradual exclusion of conservative voices from universities, the advancement of the postmodernist narrative among academics, and the dominance of postmodernist administrators in the university systems.
This has been a hugely successful strategy in general.
The K-12 pipeline of teachers is distinctly social justice postmodernist but the impact has been somewhat mooted. These are the teachers most engaged with the American population at large. They live suburban middle-class lives. While the teaching programs have been effective at planting social justice postmodernism, it struggles to survive in the real world. Eventually reality triumphs.
None-the-less, the pipeline reliably generates outraged headlines as newbie teachers try and live the totalitarian dream of confronting racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. Even where it doesn't exist.
The greatest success of the social justice postmodernist movement has been among elite universities. No one else can afford the indulgence of such dysfunctional nonsense except the wealthy cloistered and sheltered attendees of the most elite schools. They hear it from their professors. They see it in the unstable rantings of a fringe population. They badgered to signal their virtue. They do indeed emerge from university with a proclivity to see the world in some fashion similar to the tropes listed above. They imagine that the world is much closer to the ideology of social justice postmodernism than it actually is or ever could be.
These elite university graduates are the vanguard most likely to display many of the attitudes that constitute the millennial stereotype. At least until they figure out within a few short years that there are reasons for hierarchies, that having family is good, and children, and freedom of transportation with cars, the pleasure of the less crowded suburbs, and the safety of cultural conformance, etc.
Across these five trends then, it becomes clearer why the trope of Millennials as homo novii could gain such traction given the paucity of evidence. You have young inexperienced journalists interviewing progressive university professors. Young journalists who life in cities crowded with high taxes, high cost of living, high crime, high inequality, failing school systems, high poverty, etc. They live in an environment which matches the dystopia claimed by postmodernists. Young journalists who have been stewed in progressivism in their schools their entire lives. Writing about their own cohort, trying to explain why, in the midst of a Great Recession, they do not demonstrate the same achievements as earlier cohorts. They have no knowledge of history to serve as a bulwark for perspective.
So you get happy clappy stories about millennials which puts the best spin possible. Rather than report that they are demonstrating behaviors similar to everyone generation which experiences an economic shock, the stories, reflecting a confirmation bias from ideology, confirm that Millennials are different, with different goals and different behaviors, and different values.
Until the data trolls spoil the story and reveal that Millennials are just like other Americans. Millenials enjoy their hamburgers, they drive their cars, they move to the suburbs as soon as they have kids and/or can afford to, they begin saving, they become Americans by their behaviors and choices. In a good economy, they look and behave just about the same as their preceding cohorts did at the same stage in life and under the same circumstances.
At least, that is what I suspect.
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