William Morrow Generations

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I loved this book.As someone who is a fan of both History and my family heritage (which can be traced to the Mayflower on one side), this helped me to better understand what life would have been like for my ancestors and also how they probably would have seen their society.It also helped me understand the current generations alive today better. As a Millennial, I thought that the authors predicted how my generation would turn out quite well. They also nailed it with Gen-Z, who wasn’t even born yet!Overall, I would recommend to all. Especially if you are in a leadership role where understanding people of different ages can help you to more effectively work / communicate with them. History / Sociology fans and therapists will appreciate as well.Enjoy!

It's the 21st century already. Weren't we supposed to have flying cars by now? What about a moon base? Nuclear fusion? A cure for the common cold? As a kid growing up in the 1970s, raised on "Star Trek" reruns and back issues of "Popular Mechanics", I was always dreaming of the future. Everything I read or saw on TV convinced me that I would grow up to live in a utopian society, because science and technology would soon solve all of the world's problems. Everywhere I turned it seemed that optimistic futurists were touting groundbreaking advances in energy production, transportation, medicine, and space travel that were supposedly only a decade or two away. (For some reason, major breakthroughs in science and technology are always advertised as being about "a decade or two away.") Back then, I had every reason to believe that, by the turn of the 21st century, we'd all be commuting by high-speed maglev trains and hypersonic jetliners, getting unlimited power from solar arrays and fusion reactors, and watching the first humans explore the surface of Mars. But none of this happened. The optimistic futurists (and I'll count my childhood self among them, since I spent much of my time daydreaming about all the wonders the future would bring) got it wrong. But, then again, the pessimistic futurists, with their dystopian prophesies of a future plagued by nuclear war, pandemic disease, and complete societal collapse, also got it wrong. Why? Where did we make our mistakes?For one thing, we were far too willing to let our hopes and dreams -- or, alternately, our fears and nightmares -- get the better of our dispassionate critical judgment. For another, we tried to model the flow of history as a simple, linear process in which the future can be extrapolated from past and present trends, rather than acknowledging that progress is often complex and non-linear. But our main failing was to give too much weight to the scientific and technological drivers of progress, and not enough to the social, political, and economic factors that shape the course of history. We were so preoccupied with the question of what was scientifically and technologically possible that we completely failed to ask what was economically affordable, politically feasible, and socially desirable. In other words, we focused on how to build cool stuff, not on how to pay for it, who would vote for it, or whether the public even wanted it. After we finally reached the moon, optimistic futurists like me assumed that we would press on to Mars and beyond just as soon as we had the technical capability to do so. It never occurred to us that the space program might get dramatically scaled back due to changing attitudes about the value of human space exploration. In essence, we failed to take into account the simple fact that society's values and priorities change over time. This is arguably the single biggest, and most common, mistake that forecasters make when trying to predict the future.That's why all would-be prognosticators would be well advised to read this book (along with the authors' follow-up volume, "The Fourth Turning"). The authors' central thesis is that each generation has a very different outlook on life than the previous generation; and these generational differences are what drive social change over time. In fact, the authors contend that each generation will, at least to some extent, rebel against the dominant values and priorities of the preceding generation, which can cause dramatic reversals in social norms and public policies from one generation to the next. This would help to explain why a nation that was once so enthusiastic about putting a man on the moon could lose interest in space exploration so quickly after it had achieved this goal. As one generation comes of age and begins to step into the social roles previously occupied by an older generation, it will bring new values and new priorities with it. It will have its own agenda. This means that long-term projects will almost always face serious setbacks down the road, no matter how popular they may have been at their inception, due to the difficulty of maintaining their support as a new generation of workers, leaders, voters, and taxpayers comes of age. Forecasters who don't take this into account will end up making overly optimistic (or, in some cases, overly pessimistic) predictions.I'm not going to take the time to analyze, critique, or even try to summarize the various ideas presented in this book. Other reviewers have already done this; and I don't really have all that much to add. Besides, I don't think it's possible to do justice to the authors' thesis in just a few paragraphs. All I'll say is that this book gives the reader a fascinating new way of looking at how history unfolds, and how to think about the future. Many of the ideas presented here are highly contested within academia; but, then again, most new ideas are highly contested within academia -- that's what academia is for: to put ideas to the test. The bottom line for me is that reading this book will give you a new perspective on how the world changes over time; and this may prove useful, especially if you want to be able to predict what the world will be like ten, twenty, or perhaps even fifty years from now. Where most futurists go wrong is to assume that today's dreams (or nightmares) will inevitably become tomorrow's reality. What they fail to realize is that each generation has a different set of dreams and nightmares. Your children and grandchildren won't pursue your dreams; they'll pursue their own. Any long-term forecast that doesn't take this simple truth into account will someday look as naïve as my childhood prediction that, when I grew up, we would all have flying cars.

I found it difficult for me to "rewind time" back to when this book was written, and perhaps that's an intellectual fault on my part. Very dense reading and incredibly thick with facts and analysis, so be forewarned that this is a heavy read. "The Fourth Turning" is coming out in July, 2023, and I bought that book, hoping that my pea-brain can at least wrap my head around it on account of its recency. If you can engage your brain and dive deep, I suspect this book would very much appeal to you.

I've been wanting to read this book for years because I had started wondering on my own if generations were substantively different from each other and moved in cycles, although I had only gotten as far as positing 2 generational archetypes and not the four this book suggests. I hadn't read the book before now because I was concerned I was a little bit TOO ready to embrace the ideas in this book and wouldn't be reading it with a critical enough eye. I think I was right, because it is the nature of a book like this, making pronouncements about every American ever, that you must accept its ideas or not based on your own personal experience and inductive reasoning. The authors support their theory with examples, but even if they had tripled the size of the book and filled the entirety of that extra space with supporting evidence, they could easily have cherry-picked their data.That being said, I do think this book got a lot right, or at least made enough interesting points to be worthy of consideration. I wish that other authors had gotten interested in the idea and written some articles debating the details of the book's theory; I think that would have been a very interesting conversation. But, twenty years after this book was published, it doesn't look like anyone is going to be taking the bait. As far as I know, only the authors themselves have written any follow-on works to this one.There are three parts to this book. The first part lays out their idea of a four-part generation cycle and explains each generation's role in the cycle. The second part is brief, couple-page biographies of each of the eighteen generations (as defined by the authors) there have been in America since Europe began sending over colonists. The final part tries to extrapolate from the second and makes predictions about the general arc American history will take in the coming decades. My advice would be to skim the first part of the book and only really dig in once you get to the biographies. The first part is very dry and lays out a lot of vocabulary exactly one time and then the rest of the book assumes you are an expert in the vocabulary. You won't be able to (or at least I couldn't!) 100% follow the thread until you've gotten a little ways into the meat of the book and seen the authors' ideas in action.Reviewing this twenty years after publication, I can already comment on the accuracy of some of the predictions made in the book. The authors predict that if a secular crisis doesn't strike America by the year 2020 (terrorist attack or financial crisis were two possibilities they mentioned), the Baby Boom generation will manufacture one out of whatever minor issues they can lay to hand. Up until the crisis, Boomers will ratchet up a culture war, trying to purify all Americans to a set of morals (although they won't be able to agree amongst themselves which morals until the crisis hits), just as other idealist generations did before the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII. Once the crisis hits, the Boom will finally unify around one set of ideals, and once they do the other generations will unify around them too. Generation X, hardbitten and pragmatic by dint of their relatively neglected youth, will become excellent managers of the crisis. And strictly-raised Millennial youth will cheerfully do what they're told and work together to achieve almost any goal that's put in front of them. So far, according to this theory, we should be in the middle of a passionate culture war... I think they're doing well. All this has also had the side effect of getting me pretty frustrated with the Boom, which is ironic considering the book was written by two boomers, and they seem to think highly of their generation!