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How Teens Today Are Different from Past Generations

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future.

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

Disclosure statement

Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

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Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?

In general, they’re better educated – a factor tied to employment and financial well-being – but there is a sharp divide between the economic fortunes of those who have a college education and those who don’t.

Millennials have brought more racial and ethnic diversity to American society. And Millennial women, like Generation X women, are more likely to participate in the nation’s workforce than prior generations.

Compared with previous generations, Millennials – those ages 22 to 37 in 2018 – are delaying or foregoing marriage and have been somewhat slower in forming their own households. They are also more likely to be living at home with their parents, and for longer stretches.

And Millennials are now the second-largest generation in the U.S. electorate (after Baby Boomers), a fact that continues to shape the country’s politics given their Democratic leanings when compared with older generations.

Those are some of the broad strokes that have emerged from Pew Research Center’s work on Millennials over the past few years. Now that the youngest Millennials are in their 20s, we have done a comprehensive update of our prior demographic work on generations. Here are the details.

Today’s young adults are much better educated than their grandparents, as the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher has steadily climbed since 1968. Among Millennials, around four-in-ten (39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.

Gains in educational attainment have been especially steep for young women. Among women of the Silent Generation, only 11% had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree when they were young (ages 25 to 37 in 1968). Millennial women are about four times (43%) as likely as their Silent predecessors to have completed as much education at the same age. Millennial men are also better educated than their predecessors. About one-third of Millennial men (36%) have at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly double the share of Silent Generation men (19%) when they were ages 25 to 37.

While educational attainment has steadily increased for men and women over the past five decades, the share of Millennial women with a bachelor’s degree is now higher than that of men – a reversal from the Silent Generation and Boomers. Gen X women were the first to outpace men in terms of education, with a 3-percentage-point advantage over Gen X men in 2001. Before that, late Boomer men in 1989 had a 2-point advantage over Boomer women.

Boomer women surged into the workforce as young adults, setting the stage for more Gen X and Millennial women to follow suit. In 1966, when Silent Generation women were ages 22 through 37, a majority (58%) were not participating in the labor force while 40% were employed. For Millennial women today, 72% are employed while just a quarter are not in the labor force. Boomer women were the turning point. As early as 1985, more young Boomer women were employed (66%) than were not in the labor force (28%).

And despite a reputation for job hopping, Millennial workers are just as likely to stick with their employers as Gen X workers were when they were the same age. Roughly seven-in-ten each of Millennials ages 22 to 37 in 2018 (70%) and Gen Xers the same age in 2002 (69%) reported working for their current employer at least 13 months. About three-in-ten of both groups said they’d been with their employer for at least five years.

Of course, the economy varied for each generation. While the Great Recession affected Americans broadly, it created a particularly challenging job market for Millennials entering the workforce. The unemployment rate was especially high for America’s youngest adults in the years just after the recession, a reality that would impact Millennials’ future earnings and wealth.

Income and wealth

The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.

Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001. But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations. For example, Millennial workers with some college education reported making $36,000, lower than the $38,900 early Baby Boomer workers made at the same age in 1982. The pattern is similar for those young adults who never attended college.

Millennials in 2018 had a median household income of roughly $71,400, similar to that of Gen X young adults ($70,700) in 2001. (This analysis is in 2017 dollars and is adjusted for household size. Additionally, household income includes the earnings of the young adult, as well as the income of anyone else living in the household.)

The growing gap by education is even more apparent when looking at annual household income. For households headed by Millennials ages 25 to 37 in 2018, the median adjusted household income was about $105,300 for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, roughly $56,000 greater than that of households headed by high school graduates. The median household income difference by education for prior generations ranged from $41,200 for late Boomers to $19,700 for the Silent Generation when they were young.

While young adults in general do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials have slightly less wealth than Boomers did at the same age. The median net worth of households headed by Millennials (ages 20 to 35 in 2016) was about $12,500 in 2016, compared with $20,700 for households headed by Boomers the same age in 1983. Median net worth of Gen X households at the same age was about $15,100.

This modest difference in wealth can be partly attributed to differences in debt by generation. Compared with earlier generations, more Millennials have outstanding student debt, and the amount of it they owe tends to be greater. The share of young adult households with any student debt doubled from 1998 (when Gen Xers were ages 20 to 35) to 2016 (when Millennials were that age). In addition, the median amount of debt was nearly 50% greater for Millennials with outstanding student debt ($19,000) than for Gen X debt holders when they were young ($12,800).

Millennials, hit hard by the Great Recession, have been somewhat slower in forming their own households than previous generations. They’re more likely to live in their parents’ home and also more likely to be at home for longer stretches . In 2018, 15% of Millennials (ages 25 to 37) were living in their parents’ home. This is nearly double the share of early Boomers and Silents (8% each) and 6 percentage points higher than Gen Xers who did so when they were the same age.

The rise in young adults living at home is especially prominent among those with lower education. Millennials who never attended college were twice as likely as those with a bachelor’s degree or more to live with their parents (20% vs. 10%). This gap was narrower or nonexistent in previous generations. Roughly equal shares of Silents (about 7% each) lived in their parents’ home when they were ages 25 to 37, regardless of educational attainment.

Millennials are also moving significantly less than earlier generations of young adults. About one-in-six Millennials ages 25 to 37 (16%) have moved in the past year. For previous generations at the same age, roughly a quarter had.

On the whole, Millennials are starting families later than their counterparts in prior generations. Just under half (46%) of Millennials ages 25 to 37 are married, a steep drop from the 83% of Silents who were married in 1968. The share of 25- to 37-year-olds who were married steadily dropped for each succeeding generation, from 67% of early Boomers to 57% of Gen Xers. This in part reflects broader societal shifts toward marrying later in life. In 1968, the typical American woman first married at age 21 and the typical American man first wed at 23. Today, those figures have climbed to 28 for women and 30 for men.

But it’s not all about delayed marriage. The share of adults who have never married is increasing with each successive generation. If current patterns continue, an estimated one-in-four of today’s young adults will have never married by the time they reach their mid-40s to early 50s – a record high share.

In prior generations, those ages 25 to 37 whose highest level of education was a high school diploma were more likely than those with a bachelor’s degree or higher to be married. Gen Xers reversed this trend, and the divide widened among Millennials. Four-in-ten Millennials with just a high school diploma (40%) are currently married, compared with 53% of Millennials with at least a bachelor’s degree. In comparison, 86% of Silent Generation high school graduates were married in 1968 versus 81% of Silents with a bachelor’s degree or more.

Millennial women are also waiting longer to become parents than prior generations did. In 2016, 48% of Millennial women (ages 20 to 35 at the time) were moms. When Generation X women were the same age in 2000, 57% were already mothers, similar to the share of Boomer women (58%) in 1984. Still, Millennial women now account for the vast majority of annual U.S. births, and more than 17 million Millennial women have become mothers.

Younger generations (Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z) now make up a clear majority of America’s voting-eligible population . As of November 2018, nearly six-in-ten adults eligible to vote (59%) were from one of these three generations, with Boomers and older generations making up the other 41%.

However, young adults have historically been less likely to vote than their older counterparts, and these younger generations have followed that same pattern, turning out to vote at lower rates than older generations in recent elections.

In the 2016 election, Millennials and Gen Xers cast more votes than Boomers and older generations, giving the younger generations a slight majority of total votes cast. However, higher shares of Silent/Greatest generation eligible voters (70%) and Boomers (69%) reported voting in the 2016 election compared with Gen X (63%) and Millennial (51%) eligible voters. Going forward, Millennial turnout may increase as this generation grows older.

Generational differences in political attitudes and partisan affiliation are as wide as they have been in decades. Among registered voters, 59% of Millennials affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Boomers and Gen Xers (48% each) and 43% of the Silent Generation. With this divide comes generational differences on specific issue areas , from views of racial discrimination and immigration to foreign policy and the scope of government.

Population change and the future

By 2019, Millennials are projected to number 73 million, overtaking Baby Boomers as the largest living adult generation . Although a greater number of births underlie the Baby Boom generation, Millennials will outnumber Boomers in part because immigration has been boosting their numbers.

Millennials are also bringing more racial and ethnic diversity. When the Silent Generation was young (ages 22 to 37), 84% were non-Hispanic white. For Millennials, the share is just 55%. This change is driven partly by the growing number of Hispanic and Asian immigrants , whose ranks have increased since the Boomer generation. The increased prevalence of interracial marriage and differences in fertility patterns have also contributed to the country’s shifting racial and ethnic makeup.

Looking ahead at the next generation, early benchmarks show Generation Z (those ages 6 to 21 in 2018) is on track to be the nation’s most diverse and best-educated generation yet. Nearly half (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. And while most are still in K-12 schools, the oldest Gen Zers are enrolling in college at a higher rate than even Millennials were at their age. Early indications are that their opinions on issues are similar to those of Millennials .

Of course, Gen Z is still very young and may be shaped by future unknown events. But Pew Research Center looks forward to spending the next few years studying life for this new generation as it enters adulthood.

All photos via Getty Images

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How to Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future—Not Our Past

Moving forward, young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world

In this Issue:

• Spring 2020 View All Other Issues
• Notes From the President: The Learning Curve
• Crunch: Lifelong Learning
• Foreword: Learning Is a Science
• Neuroscience in the Classroom
• Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future
• Lifelong Learning
• Americans and Lifetime Learning
• Personal Learning
• Machines Are Learning
• Five Questions: How the Brain Learns
• Voices: Learning Requires...
• View All Other Issues

Almost 12 million students who took the global test known as PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) were not able to complete even the most basic reading, mathematics, or science tasks—and these were 15-year-olds living in the 72 high- and middle-income countries that participated in the last test in 2015.

Over the past decade, there has been virtually no improvement in the learning outcomes of students in the Western world, even though spending on schooling rose by almost 20 percent during this period. And in countries like the United States, the quality of learning outcomes can still best be predicted by a school’s ZIP code.

So it might be tempting to click on some other article and drop any thought about improving education. Is it impossible to change anything as big, complex, and entrenched in vested interests as education? Well, keep on reading and consider this: The learning outcomes among the most disadvantaged 10 percent of Vietnamese and Estonian 15-year-old students now compare favorably with those among the wealthiest 10 percent of families in most of Latin America and are on a par with those of the average student in the United States and Europe.

Consider that in most countries, we can find excellence in education in some of the most disadvantaged schools—and that many of today’s leading education systems have only recently attained these top positions. So it can be done. 

But change can be a struggle. Young people are less likely to invest their time and energy in better education if it seems irrelevant to the demands of the “real” world. Businesses are less likely to invest in their employees’ lifelong learning if those workers might move away for a better job. And policymakers are often more likely to prioritize immediate concerns over long-range issues.

But this long-range view is necessary. For those with the right knowledge and skills, digitalization and globalization have been liberating and exciting, while for those who are insufficiently prepared, they can mean vulnerable and insecure work, and a life with few prospects. Our economies are shifting toward regional hubs of production, linked by global chains of information and goods but concentrated where comparative advantage can be built and renewed. This makes the distribution of knowledge and wealth crucial, and that is intimately tied to the distribution of educational opportunities.

In this digitalized global age, the next generation of young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world. That will require imagination, empathy, resilience, and entrepreneurship, the ability to fail forward. The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning. People used to learn to do the work; now learning is the work, and the post-industrial era will require coaching, mentoring, teaching, and evaluating that can build passion for learning.

There must be an appreciation for the value of learning well beyond high school, beyond college graduation. People need to take ownership over what they learn, how they learn, where they learn, and when they learn. And lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Governments can help. The easiest way is telling young people more of the truth about the social and labor-market relevance of their learning. Education systems can be incentivized to help learners choose a field of study that resonates with their passions, in which they can excel, and that allows them to contribute to society, putting people on the path to success. Unfortunately, many educational institutions still focus on marketing fields of study that are easy to provide, which leaves some university graduates struggling to find good jobs even as employers say they cannot find the people with needed skills. In many countries, such skill mismatches keep rising.

Lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Also needed moving forward is a shift from qualifications-based certification systems to more knowledge- and skills-based certification systems. That means moving from documenting education pathways and degrees to highlighting what individuals can actually do, regardless of how and where they acquired their knowledge, skills, and character qualities. As the digital transformation diversifies training and learning opportunities, this certification of knowledge and skills becomes increasingly important, and businesses are increasingly testing knowledge and skills on their own while relying less on diplomas.

The dilemma for education is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach have become easy to digitize and automate. There is no question that state-of-the-art knowledge and skills in a discipline will always remain important. But the modern world no longer rewards us just for what we know—Google knows everything—but for extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge creatively in novel situations. The industrial age taught us how to educate students so they could remember what we told them; in the age of artificial intelligence, we will need to think harder about how we can pair the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social, and emotional skills and values of people.

Whether artificial intelligence will destroy or create more jobs will very much depend on our success with this and whether our imagination, our awareness, and our sense of responsibility will help us harness technology to shape the world for the better. It is telling that employment in Europe’s creative industries—those that specialize in the use of talent for commercial purposes—grew at 3.6 percent during the crucial period between 2011 and 2013, a time when many European sectors were shedding jobs or showing stagnant employment rates.

Moreover, technology and artificial intelligence are not magic powers; they are just extraordinary amplifiers and accelerators that add speed and accuracy. Artificial intelligence will amplify good ideas and good practice in the same way that it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice; i.e., artificial intelligence is ethically neutral. However, it is always in the hands of people who are not neutral. That is why education in the future is not just about teaching people something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass to navigate an increasingly complex, ambiguous, and volatile world. Ethics will be at the heart of 21st-century learning.

There are other important dimensions too. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by synthesizing different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. That requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.

Not least, social skills are rising in labor-market relevance, so tomorrow’s citizens will need to think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge. Employers increasingly seek to attract learners who easily adapt and can share, apply, and transfer their skills and knowledge. At work, at home, and in the community, people will need a deep understanding of how others live in different cultures and traditions and how others think, whether as scientists or artists. Digitalization can enrich this capacity but also put it at risk.

The challenge is that developing such cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities requires a very different approach to teaching and learning, well beyond imparting and absorbing prefabricated knowledge. In the most advanced education systems, teaching has become a profession of advanced knowledge workers who own their professional practice and who work with a high level of professional autonomy and within a collaborative culture. In Finland, there tend to be nine applicants for every teaching post, not because teaching is financially more attractive than in other countries but because teaching in Finland is intellectually attractive.

The past was divided, with teachers and content divided by subjects, and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects. Nowadays, education is becoming more integrated, with an emphasis on the interrelation of subjects and the integration of students. It is also becoming more connected, with learning closely related to real-world contexts and contemporary issues and open to the rich resources in the community, becoming project-based, and helping students to think across the boundaries of subject-matter disciplines.

Some education systems also embrace technology in ways that elevate the role of teachers as co-creators and designers of innovative learning environments. Digital learning systems cannot just teach us science; they can simultaneously observe how we learn and determine the kinds of tasks and thinking that interest us—as well as the kinds of problems that we find boring or difficult. These systems can then adapt learning to suit our personal learning style with far greater granularity and precision than any traditional classroom setting possibly can. Similarly, virtual laboratories give us the opportunity to design, conduct, and learn from experiments rather than just learning about them.

Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge.

There are good examples of technology enhancing experiential learning by supporting project- and inquiry-based teaching methods, facilitating hands-on activities and cooperative learning, and delivering formative real-time assessments. There are also interesting examples of technology supporting learning with interactive, nonlinear courseware based on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated software for experimentation and simulation, social media, and educational games. These are precisely the learning tools that are needed to develop 21st-century knowledge and skills. Not least, one teacher can now educate and inspire millions of learners and communicate ideas to the whole world.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is that it not only serves individual learners and educators, but it also can build an ecosystem around learning to create communities that make learning more social and more fun, recognizing that collaborative learning enhances goal orientation, motivation, persistence, and the development of effective learning strategies.

Similarly, technology can build communities of teachers to share and enrich teaching resources and practices and to collaborate on professional growth and the institutionalization of professional practice. It can help system leaders and governments develop and share best practices around curriculum design, policy, and pedagogy. Imagine a giant crowdsourcing platform where teachers, education researchers, and policy experts collaborate to curate the most relevant content and professional practice to achieve education goals, and where students anywhere in the world have access to the best and most innovative education experiences.

The challenge is that such system transformation cannot be mandated by government, which leads to surface compliance, nor can it be built solely from the ground up.

Governments cannot innovate in the classroom, but government has a key role as platform and broker, as stimulator and enabler; it can focus resources, set a facilitative policy climate, and use accountability and reporting modifications to encourage new practice. But government needs to better identify key agents of change, champion them, and find more effective approaches to scaling and disseminating innovations. That is also about finding better ways to recognize, reward, and give exposure to success, to do whatever is possible to make it easier for innovators to take risks and encourage the emergence of new ideas. The past was about public versus private; the future is about public with private.

The challenges look daunting, but many education systems are now well on their way toward finding innovative responses to them, not just in isolated, local examples, but also systemically. This is essential if we are to create a future for millions of learners who currently do not have one. That task is not about making the impossible possible, but about making the possible attainable.

The Takeaway

The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning.

Andreas Schleicher is the director for education and skills and special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Future of Learning: A Career of Learning

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Essay on Generation Gap: 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 29, 2023

Have you ever found it difficult to communicate your ideas and emotions to those who are either younger or older than you? Do you find it difficult to persuade your elders to take action? Do you ever feel that your priorities, perspective, and way of thinking are completely different from those of your own parents? Sounds relatable? You are not alone! This is what the generation gap looks like. The generation gap refers to the differences in our opinions, points of view, and perspectives about other people. The generation gap takes place due to developments and changes around the world. Adapting to a new environment has always been in human nature. In the beginning, we all struggle to adapt to new changes, but, with time we adapt ourselves and cope with the new conditions. Here are some sample essay on the generation gap for school students.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Generation Gap in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Generation Gap in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Generation Gap in 300 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 100 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 200 Words

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Essay on Generation Gap in 300 Words

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Ans: The generation gap is a natural phenomenon where people with different values and perspectives clash. What one views as good might not be the same for someone from a different age group. The generation gap is caused due to factors such as technological advancements, the evolution of societal values and cultural norms, changes in communication styles, and other factors. The generation gap is a broader concept and it is essential for us to embrace and bridge this gap.

The generation gap can be bridged by fostering mutual understanding, education, putting yourself in other’s shoes, and emphasizing common values of respect, trust, kindness, etc.

Ans: Older generations can teach the value of time and respecting elders. They can encourage us to follow our passion, take care of our health, not to sweat small stuff, not to judge people, etc.

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Essay on Today’s Generation

Students are often asked to write an essay on Today’s Generation in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Understanding today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often called Generation Z, is a tech-savvy group born between 1997 and 2012. They are digital natives, growing up with the internet, smartphones, and social media.

Adapting to Change

This generation adapts to change quickly. They are used to fast-paced technological advancements and are comfortable learning new things. They value diversity and inclusivity.

Challenges Faced

Despite their adaptability, they face challenges like online bullying and mental health issues. The pressure to always be ‘connected’ can be overwhelming.

Understanding today’s generation helps us to nurture their talents and address their challenges effectively.

250 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

Introduction, characteristics of today’s generation.

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativeness. They are comfortable with technology, having grown up with the internet, smartphones, and social media as integral parts of their lives. This has led to a generation that is highly connected, with global perspectives and a strong sense of social responsibility.

Challenges and Opportunities

However, this digital immersion also presents challenges. The over-reliance on technology can lead to issues like cyberbullying, privacy concerns, and mental health problems. Yet, it also presents opportunities. Today’s generation is adept at multitasking, quick to adapt to new technologies, and skilled at leveraging digital platforms for creative expression and social activism.

The unique characteristics and challenges of today’s generation are shaping the world in new ways. As digital natives, they are redefining communication, education, and work, and are poised to drive significant societal and technological advancements. Understanding and addressing their needs and aspirations is crucial for creating a future that leverages their strengths and mitigates their challenges.

500 Words Essay on Today’s Generation

The characteristics of today’s generation.

Today’s generation, often referred to as Generation Z or the iGeneration, is markedly different from its predecessors. Born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, this generation is the first to grow up in a world where the internet, social media, and advanced technology are the norm rather than the exception.

One of the defining characteristics of today’s generation is their digital nativity. Unlike previous generations who had to adapt to the digital world, today’s youth are born into it. They are comfortable navigating the digital landscape, be it for communication, education, or entertainment. This has enabled them to develop skills such as multitasking and information filtering at an early age.

Impact of Technology on Today’s Generation

However, the ubiquity of technology also brings challenges. Cyberbullying, online privacy threats, and the potential for misinformation are significant concerns. Moreover, the overuse of technology can lead to issues like decreased physical activity and face-to-face social interaction. Balancing the benefits and drawbacks of technology is a unique challenge for today’s generation.

Societal and Environmental Consciousness

Today’s generation is remarkably conscious of societal and environmental issues. They are more likely to champion causes such as climate change, mental health, and social justice. This heightened awareness and activism are largely facilitated by social media, which provides a platform for sharing information, rallying support, and mobilizing action.

The Future and Today’s Generation

However, it’s crucial to remember that today’s generation is not a monolith. Their experiences and perspectives are diverse, shaped by factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, and geography. As such, it’s essential to avoid overgeneralizing and to appreciate the richness of their individual experiences.

In conclusion, today’s generation is a dynamic and complex group. They are digital natives, navigating a world interwoven with technology. They are socially and environmentally conscious, driven to make a positive impact on the world. And despite the challenges they face, they are resilient, adaptable, and poised to shape the future. Understanding them is not just an academic exercise, but a necessity for anyone looking to stay relevant in an ever-evolving world.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Generation Gap — Generation Gap: The Differences Between New Generation And Parents’ Generation

Generation Gap: How Today's Generation is Different from Their Parents' Generation

• Categories: Generation Generation Gap

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Words: 1119 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 1119 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, difference between old and new generation, works cited:, jobs fields, educational prospects.

• Bergsteiner, H., & Avery, G. C. (2010). The importance of learning styles: Understanding the implications for learning, course design, and education. Education Sciences, 1(2), 116-125.
• Kinsella, E. A. (2010). The Kolb Learning Style Inventory—Version 3.1 2005 technical specifications. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 31(2-3), 271-276.
• McDonald, J., & Boud, D. (2003). The impact of self-assessment on achievement: The effects of self-assessment training on performance in external examinations. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 10(2), 209-220.
• Murphy, J. (2004). Exploring Kolb's learning styles in management education. Journal of Management Education, 28(2), 191-210.
• Nicol, D., Macfarlane‐Dick, D., & Macfarlane, S. (2006). Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2), 139-149

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Generation Me – a New Generation, Essay Example

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Arguments of Jean Twenge

Twenge feels that the young Americans of today have a great deal more confidence than their parents. Equally they are confident and have self-esteem but despite this they are exceedingly depressed and more miserable than previous generations. The position is argued from the standpoint of 14 years research, comparing results of personality tests that were given to members of the baby boomer generation.

Today’s generation have highly optimistic outlooks in terms of the ability to obtain both a college and University education. This ability to obtain a first class education in a leading country like the USA should translate to the ability to obtain a good job, earn a lot of money and even become famous. It translates to achieving the American Dream of having a great job, a good house and the luxuries that a good income provides. However, reality has changed this to that of a ruthless financial economy where unemployment has soared, the costs of housing and healthcare have escalated to record levels and it is becoming exceedingly difficult to borrow or loan money.

Essentially this generation find themselves in an uncaring environment where they are thrust into competition where only the very best will survive and achieve their ambitions. This has resulted in many teens thinking that the world demands perfection from them and they are starting to crack under the stress and pressure. Despite being confident in their own abilities, the aspect of self-esteem, this is being beaten down by the demands of society stating you are not good enough. The reality is that there are becoming fewer really good career opportunities and the big firms only want the best and brightest graduates. It is the concept of not going just to University but ensuring you graduate from one of the top business schools or colleges from a business recognition perspective.

Generation Me – A new generation

Twenge clearly makes the connection between the pressures of society in order to make individuals succeed. The boosting of over confidence and building of self-esteem is to set individual standards which are unrealistic to the society that we live in. Compare the number of graduates throughout the US Education system to the reality of good career opportunities being presented in industry today. Costs are sky rocketing, unemployment is high, there are fewer jobs available and students are graduating with debts that may take a decade to repay. Parents are also increasingly worried about how this has created more liberal attitudes towards sex with teenage and young students. The consequences of HIV and other serious sexually transmitted diseases are a darker side where increased freedom has led to potential serious medical consequences at an early age.

There are ample medical and educational statistics that support the findings of Dr. Twenge. Further economic and industrial statistics provide evidence of low growth in the USA, fewer jobs being created, higher returns of unemployment and less capital investment to support research and continued professional development of the young people entering the job market. The increased level of retirement from ‘ the baby boomer period’ has left a lack of trained mentors and coaches in the system to pass on the skills and experience that industry demands. This is particularly evident in manufacturing industry, the professions and the high technology / scientific research firms.

In Moore’s film Sicko he focuses on the plight of the health industry and the massive amount of underinsured Americans. It is essentially a breakdown in Government administration to protect the basic rights of the individual i.e. a healthcare system for everyone regardless of class or creed. It underscores Twenge’s point of a failing society, the concept of the younger generation being on their own and nobody is running to the rescue.

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From moscow to the fifth dimension: memoir of a slow learner.

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• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California; email: [email protected]
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This essay contains an account of my professional life from its beginnings as a third-generation, Skinnerian, mathematical learning theorist to its current state as an interdisciplinary developmentalist. Following completion of my PhD at Indiana University, I spent the academic year at Moscow State University where I worked under the direction of Alexander Luria, whose ideas led to my lifelong interest in cultural-historical approaches to human development. For more than a decade, I conducted cross-cultural research on the role of formal schooling in the cognitive development of children growing up in a variety of sociocultural conditions. Since the late 1970s, my research has focused on the design of educational activities involving partnerships between institutions of higher learning and their communities. A constant concern throughout this work has been the inappropriate use of psychological methods when comparing people from different culture backgrounds and a search for the means required to remediate the resulting difficulties.

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• A new generation is rising in Russia

Vladimir Putin’s election victory does not mean that there is no hope

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KONSTANTIN CHERNENKO, the general secretary of the Communist Party, died on the night of March 10th 1985 at the age of 73. As red flags trimmed with black ribbons went up in every city in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev rushed to an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the Kremlin. That meeting put Mr Gorbachev in charge of the funeral committee—and thus, by extension, of the Communist Party and the country. Chernenko was of the generation that had risen through the ranks under Stalin. (And he was the third general secretary to die in less than three years, in what was memorably dubbed a “hearse race”.) After him, the party elders all felt that a younger, more dynamic leader was needed to rejuvenate the Soviet system and ensure its survival.

It was not until four the next morning that Mr Gorbachev returned to his dacha. As he and his wife walked the snow-covered paths of its garden, he summed up the mood of the elite and the country: “We just can’t go on living like this.” Nor did they. Mr Gorbachev gave individual livelihoods and well-being—the “human values”, as he put it—precedence over state or class interests, launching new policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), and bringing the cold war to a close.

The Soviet system could not keep going without deception and repression. Unwittingly and unwillingly, Mr Gorbachev brought about its end. What followed, however, was not the miraculous emergence of a “normal” country as many had hoped, but a decade of turbulence, economic decline, rising crime and social breakdown, and Mr Gorbachev got the blame. As he said years later, “It is my grandchildren’s generation who are benefiting from perestroika . They are more confident, freer, they know that they must rely on themselves.”

Alexander Gabuev was born on the day Chernenko died. He is one of those “grandchildren”. Now 33, he is the chief China expert at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank. Fluent in English, Mandarin and German, he criss-crosses the world briefing government officials. In his spare time, between playing tennis and drinking rum cocktails in a Moscow bar, he cultivates a network of young experts and policymakers to thrash out “actionable ideas” of how to reform the country when they come to power. “We need to be ready,” he says.

Olga Mostinskaya and Fedor Ovchinnikov are a few years older than Mr Gabuev. Ms Mostinskaya, 36, is a politician born into a family of diplomats. She spent ten years as an interpreter working directly for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, before resigning in 2014 “out of repugnance”. The war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea were only the last straw, she says. Three years later she was elected to a local council in Moscow on a pledge to “empower, inform and engage” her voters.

Mr Ovchinnikov, also 36, grew up in a family of journalists in Syktyvkar, near the Arctic Circle. He was a teenager when Mr Gorbachev, trying to raise money for his foundation, appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial with his ten-year-old granddaughter: “Because of him, we have opportunity!” a young man in the advert tells a disgruntled old-timer. A decade later, Mr Ovchinnikov used that opportunity to launch a pizza place in Syktyvkar. His firm, Dodo, now has 300 outlets in Russia, as well as one in Britain and two in America.

Regeneration

Belonging to a generation involves more than proximity of dates of birth. As Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist, wrote in 1928, a meaningful generation is also forged by the common experience of a trauma that becomes central to its identity. Contemporaries become a generation, he argued, only when “they are potentially capable of being sucked into the vortex of social change.”

Mr Gabuev, Ms Mostinskaya, Mr Ovchinnikov and other Russians are part of a new generation of Russian elite who share the European values declared by Mr Gorbachev around the time of their birth and are traumatised by their reversal 30 years later. A significant and vocal group, they are imbued with a sense of entitlement and have the potential and desire to complete Russia’s aborted transition to a “normal” country. Whether they get a chance to do so depends on many factors, including their determination and the resistance of the system embodied by Mr Putin’s rule.

The new generation define themselves by their difference from their “fathers” as well as some similarities with their “grandfathers”. Gorbachev’s grandchildren recognise in each other a dissatisfaction with the aggression, degradation and lies that underpin Mr Putin’s rule. He presides over the sort of power structure that Douglass North, an American political economist, has called the “natural state”. In this, rents are created by limiting access to economic and political resources, and the limits are enforced by “specialists in violence”. In Russia these are the siloviki of the assorted security and police forces, serving the system as they did in Soviet times.

That system is not about to crumble. But the rise of a new generation—especially one which, through quirks of demography, is large (see chart)—matters in Russia. “Every new group coming to power has always declared a break with the previous one,” wrote Yuri Levada, a prominent Russian academic, “blaming it for every possible sin. A demonstrable rejection of predecessors has been the main way for leaders of a new generation to establish themselves in power, regardless of whether they carried on or changed the means and style of governance.”

Lacking strong civil institutions, Gorbachev’s grandchildren look to their peers for definition, for their place in society and, as Mannheim would have it, in history. But so do their opponents, the disenfranchised nationalists who are similarly dissatisfied with the corruption and cynicism of Mr Putin’s rule. The difference, at least for now, is that the nationalists lack leadership and resources and are overshadowed by the Kremlin’s own rhetoric.

Only one winner

The presidential election on March 18th showed, on the face of it, little prospect of any change. With television and the bureaucratic powers of the state at his beck and call, Mr Putin was re-elected with 77% of the vote. The result reflected the status quo and was hardly surprising. Many civil servants and factory workers were cajoled into voting by their bosses, and driven to the polls. Thanks to pre-election thuggery, Mr Putin faced no serious challenger. Boris Nemtsov, the most credible liberal politician of Mr Putin’s generation, was murdered three years ago, shot beside the wall of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, the most plausible candidate of the new generation, was barred from standing in December after the Kremlin engineered fraud charges against him.

“This is not an election,” said Igor Malashenko, who helped Boris Yeltsin keep the presidency in 1996. “It is a theatre performance directed by the Kremlin.” But he still thought it mattered. That is why he ran the campaign of Ksenia Sobchak, a 36-year-old socialite-turned-politician. Her father was the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg and once Mr Putin’s boss. She stood on the Kremlin’s sufferance. It used her as a spoiler for Mr Navalny, who is 41. But while the Kremlin used her, she hoped to use it to build a platform from which to move into real, as opposed to Potemkin politics. For both Ms Sobchak and Mr Navalny an appeal to a young generation is central to their politics.

Ms Sobchak’s strategy was the opposite of Mr Navalny’s. Once he had been barred from standing, he called for a boycott of the election to undermine its legitimacy. He accused Ms Sobchak of helping Mr Putin by taking part. Though blocked from standing, he managed to dominate the election agenda. Many young people are thought to have abstained, though it is hard to tell whether this was because of apathy or a rejection of Mr Putin.

As polling stations in Moscow closed, Ms Sobchak, who in the end got only 1.7% of votes, went to Mr Navalny’s headquarters blaming him for refusing to back her. He pushed her away, noting that her loss was a measure of his success. She looked deflated; Mr Navalny, off camera, uncorked the champagne. “We have created a new opposition in a place where it was impossible,” he said.

If the election was a ritual, it was still important. Giving Mr Putin another six years would “mark the arrival of the post-Putin era”, argued Ivan Krastev and Gleb Pavlovsky, two political analysts, in a recent paper for the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. Constitutionally Mr Putin cannot stand in 2024, and from now on political life will be dominated by the question of succession and expectation of his departure. His own survival and preservation of the system he now presides over will be his sole objective.

Mr Putin has seen crises of succession before—one brought him to power. As a youngKGB officer he served the ossified leaderships of Chernenko and Leonid Brezhnev. Their generation had grown old in power in part because it had won it young. Stalin’s purges meant that by 1940 around half the party elite was under the age of 40.

Who remembers the sixties?

The generation that followed identified themselves as shestidesiatniki —the men of the 1960s. Soviet victory in the second world war gave them confidence in their country. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party, at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, gave them their political inspiration. Many of their spiritual leaders were children of old Bolsheviks killed in the purges. They had a sense of being both entitled and required to put the country back on the course of true socialism—this time with a human face. Those hopes were crushed when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. They had to wait until 1985 for their chance.

The Brezhnev generation stayed long in power; the men of the 1960s did not. Mr Gorbachev was gone by 1991. Yeltsin, his contemporary and successor, was not part of that generation ideologically and surrounded himself with men who were 25-30 years his junior. The children of the 1960s men, the last Soviet generation, declared their fathers bankrupt both financially and intellectually. Socialism with a human face died with the Soviet economy.

The alternative was capitalism, which Soviet propaganda had portrayed as a cut-throat and cynical system in which cunning and ruthlessness mattered more than integrity or rules, and where money was the only measure of success. The new elite did not abandon that view. Those with power and connections acquired the material attributes of Western life. They could not buy its institutions, rules or norms—but they were not interested in trying.

Meanwhile millions of people in the first post-revolutionary decade of the 1990s felt disoriented, robbed of social status and savings. This was cynically and successfully exploited by Mr Putin. Yeltsin had promoted him as a man who, although of the next generation, would protect the wealth and safety of the elite. But Mr Putin consolidated his power by rejecting Yeltsin’s legacy and demonising the 1990s. His first symbolic gesture was the restoration of the Soviet anthem, which Yeltsin had abandoned. This was quickly followed by real changes, including suppression of freedom of speech and redistribution of assets and rents.

Mr Putin has become the patron of a cohort of young technocrats in order to manage, and survive, the next generational shift. He wants these young men (as they are for the most part) to provide some economic modernisation while not upsetting the system or provoking social unrest. And he wants their continued deference and loyalty as he moves from father figure to grandfather. Today six regional governors, two ministers and 20 deputy ministers are in their 30s. Yet, politically Mr Putin needs these technocrats to preserve a system in which entitlements, privileges and rents are allocated not according to law or merit but by access to resources and by position in the social hierarchy. This system of “conditional” property rights has allowed Mr Putin’s friends and cronies to put their children into positions of wealth and power.

The son of Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the National Security Council and former chief of theFSB, heads a state-owned bank. The son of Sergei Ivanov, another formerKGB officer and old friend of Mr Putin, is the head of Alrosa, a state-owned firm which mines more diamonds than any other in the world. The son of Mikhail Fradkov, a former prime minister and intelligence service chief, heads a private bank which is the staple of the military-industrial complex. Many children of Mr Putin’s friends and cronies hold senior positions in Gazprom, Russia’s gas monopoly, or own firms that depend on its contracts. All of them enjoy positions and wealth thanks largely to their family names.

Yet this also makes them vulnerable to political changes that come with generational shifts. Russian elites have endlessly tried to establish unconditional property rights for themselves. Andrei Zorin, a historian at Oxford University, sees this yearning for institutions that can guarantee both physical security and the transfer of wealth across the generations as one of the main reasons that Russian elites have sought to emulate Western Europe.

Those who oppose

For all the difference in their tactics, Mr Navalny and Ms Sobchak share a vision of Russia as a normal European country subject to the rule of law. As a populist who comes from outside the system, Mr Navalny appeals to people alienated by the elites. He demands retribution and a complete overhaul of government, with those now in power barred from office. Ms Sobchak, who is far closer to the beneficiaries of Mr Putin’s rule, promises a change without exposing the elite to reprisal. Justifying this halfway house, she says “Everything in this country belongs to these people. Billions of dollars, the army and security services, the largest companies. They can lose it only if there is a social explosion and even then they will probably fight to the last bullet. But Putin does not want to be a Qaddafi.”

This realism reflects the view that, even among the children of the elite, there is an appetite for change. Dmitry Gudkov, a 37-year-old opposition politician whose coalition won a majority in more than a dozen local councils in Moscow, is also the son of a formerKGB lieutenant-colonel, says: “The children [of the elite] are feeling uncomfortable in the shadow of their parents. They don’t want to be associated with all this obscurantism, self-isolation and anti-Westernism. They don’t want to risk their businesses now by speaking out in public, but they are constantly sending us signals that they are on our side.” Mr Gudkov and Ms Sobchak are now forming a party together.

The loyalists who have come of age under Mr Putin, and benefited from his patronage—the cadre from which he draws the technocrats whom he hopes will shore up the system—credit him with rebuilding the state. But they, too, see change ahead. As Mr Pavlovsky puts it, they “want to make [the system] inhabitable”. But so did Mr Gorbachev when he came to power.

This interest in making or managing change, rather than simply benefiting from it, is relatively recent. In the 2000s Gorbachev’s grandchildren seemed apolitical. Soaring incomes, the opening ofIKEA stores and a mushrooming of cafés, bars and nightclubs in Moscow were not taken as an achievement of the state, for which they should be grateful, but as a norm which they took for granted. They saw the end of the cold war not as a loss, but as part of becoming a normal country.

Mr Putin (and his circle) had a complex relationship with the West, coloured both by features of his generation and his service in theKGB. “As part of the last Soviet generation he longed for Western comforts and goods. As aKGB officer, he was instilled with an idea of the West as an enemy,” says Natalia Gevorkyan, Mr Putin’s biographer. The result was a ressentiment mixture of jealousy and inferiority which fuelled anti-Americanism.

To Gorbachev’s grandchildren, by contrast, the West was just a place where they went. They did not crave its material attributes because they already had them. What they wanted were its institutions and rights. While older liberals lamented their lack of politics and public life, they were cultivating their urban space, with its parks, bike lanes and food courts. This shaped their expectations and sensibilities more than political statements. The presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, a place-holder installed by Mr Putin in 2008, fitted stylistically with this urban modernisation.

The new generation had no great enthusiasm for Mr Medvedev’s politics, but they liked the fact that he loved his iPad (Mr Putin prides himself on never using the internet). As rumours of Mr Putin’s return to the Kremlin began to swirl, though, Mr Medvedev started to become something more—a figurehead for a modernisation which he was not really enabling, but from which Mr Putin’s return would be a step back. When in September 2011 Mr Medvedev announced a pre-arranged job swap with Mr Putin, who had sat out one presidential term as prime minister, frustration boiled over.

Old style, new style

A rigged parliamentary election in 2011, which a few years earlier would have gone unnoticed, triggered protests in Moscow and other big cities; hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. Mr Navalny galvanised the movement using social networks. The young, including the previously apolitical elite, joined in. Ms Sobchak, once known only as an it-girl and star of reality television, stood in front of a crowd and declared, “I am Ksenia Sobchak and I have much to lose.”

In anger, Mr Putin turned his back on the young and the educated, appealing instead to older members of the working class and public-sector workers and unleashing nationalist and traditionalist rhetoric that infringed on the urban elite’s style and private space. “It was my breaking point,” Ms Sobchak says now, “they started taking away what we already had.” Andrei Sinyavsky, a writer jailed for anti-Soviet propaganda, quipped after emigrating to France in the 1973 that his “differences with the Soviet regime were purely of a stylistic nature”. The new generation increasingly defines itself by such stylistic differences, rather than through any sort of political cohesiveness. But style in Russia often becomes politics.

Gorbachev’s grandchildren have never had to worry about being left penniless and that means they are less bothered about money. Success in the 1990s meant having a chauffeur, shopping in London and eating at $200-a-head restaurants. To be cool today is to use car-sharing, attend a public lecture about urbanism or make your own way around India. “I prefer cycling around Kaliningrad to going by car,” says Anton Alikhanov, the city’s 31-year-old governor. “And I don’t understand why investors want to put money into building another three floors of a house, instead of increasing the value of their properties by cultivating public space.”

Value judgments

Many care instead about what they can accomplish professionally rather than what they can get and about what they share, not what they own. They do not envy Mr Putin’s cronies who live behind high fences, fly on private jets and have built special rooms for their fur coats. They ridicule them.

They hate the propaganda of state television, which for a long time was one of the main instruments of social control. It now irritates people more than the stagnating economy, according to Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, a think-tank. They live online in a world of individual voices. They speak a direct language. Hence the success of Yuri Dud, whose YouTube interviews of people with something to say, be they politicians, actors or rappers, are watched by millions. These are neither pro- nor anti-Kremlin but are simply outside the system. There was a similar striving for sincerity in the early 1960s when a plain, living language seemed an antidote to Soviet bombast. It is another thing Mr Gorbachev’s grandchildren and the men of the sixties have in common.

Mr Gorbachev drew his support from a vast number of scientists and engineers who had time and skill but lacked prospects. Today, the demand for change is coming from an army of young entrepreneurs who want a system regulated by rules and open to competition. For people like Mr Ovchinnikov, business has become a form of activism. Openness is both his core business principle and selling point.

Mr Ovchinnikov turned Dodo’s growth into something resembling a reality television show through a blog called Sila Uma (Brainpower). Both investors and customers watched Dodo deliver both pizza and profits in real time. “We wanted to prove that you can be honest and transparent in Russia.” Within a few years Dodo, largely crowdfunded through the internet, employed 10,000 people. Mr Ovchinnikov and others like him treat transparency not as a risk, but as a way of protecting themselves from the system.

“There are two parallel countries,” Mr Ovchinnikov says. “There is a country of smart and energetic people who want to make it open and competitive. And there is another country of security servicemen who drive in blackSUVs extorting rents.” The two clashed when, earlier this year, Mr Ovchinnikov was accused of pushing drugs after the staff of one of his pizza joints in Moscow reported finding drugs in a lavatory that had, in fact, been planted by criminals with police protection apparently in order to extract a bribe or ruin his business. Mr Ovchinnikov gave his side of the raid through social media and the story went viral. It was picked up by Mr Navalny who mentioned it in one of his YouTube videos. A few weeks later the prosecutors backed off.

That will not always be the case. Part of North’s logic of the “natural state” is that when rents get scarce the role of violence goes up. Many young Russians see a job in the security services as the only social lift available. A recent survey found that more than 75% of people under the age of 30 find a security-service job attractive and 50% would like their children to have one. And which way the spooks turn will affect Russia’s future. ManyFSB officers are apparently in “suitcase” mood, ready to switch sides if necessary. But some are more ideological, and therefore more dangerous.

Last autumn, youngFSB officers in a unit called the “Service for the Protection of Constitutional Order and the Fight Against Terrorism” arrested several anarchists and left-wing anti-fascists, accused them of trying to “destabilise the political situation in the country” and subjected them to torture and humiliation. As one victim was told as he was tasered: “You must understand, anFSB officer always gets what he wants.” Social-media profiles of some of those officers revealed their ultra-nationalist views. None of them has been charged or dismissed.

The impunity that the security services have gained under Mr Putin has reversed Mr Gorbachev’s main principle: individual life and human values take precedence over the purposes of the state. Gorbachev’s grandchildren want those values back. “The current state system is not only incompetent. It is immoral,” says Mr Gabuev. “A state should be a service, not an idol.”

Vote for change

The young elite is resentful of pretence, simulation and cynicism—the staples of the current system. Instead they crave convictions and ideas. This was one reason why many Russians refused to cast a ballot on March 18th. Neither Mr Gabuev nor Mr Ovchinnikov saw any point in going to the polls. Ms Mostinskaya, by contrast, did. “Participation gives you a right to act in the future,” she says. Rather than backing one of the candidates, she spoiled her ballot paper by scribbling on the top: “One day, even if not now, all this will change.”

From left clockwise in illustration: Alexei Navalny, Olga Mostinskaya, Alexander Gabuev, Fedor Ovchinnikov, Ksenia Sobchak

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Gorbachev’s grandchildren”

Briefing March 24th 2018

From the March 24th 2018 edition

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Topic-to-essay generation with knowledge-based content selection

The topic-to-essay generation task is a challenging natural language generation task that aims to generate paragraph-level text with high semantic coherence based on a given set of topic words. Previous work has focused on the introduction of external knowledge, ignoring the insufficient generated text diversity. In order to improve the generation diversity, we propose a novel copy mechanism model with a content selection module that integrates rich semantic knowledge from the language model into the decoder. Furthermore, we introduce the improved prefix tuning method to train the model, enabling it to adapt to varying input complexities. In addition, we have contributed a new Chinese dataset for TEG tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can improve the generated text diversity by 35% to 59% compared to the state-of-the-art method, while maintaining a high level of topic consistency.

Index Terms —  Topic-to-essay generation, New Chinese dataset, Knowledge Selection

1 Introduction

Topic-to-essay generation (TEG), which aims at generating fluent, novel, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with several given topics (keywords), as shown in Fig. 1 , has a great deal of practical applications. It can be used for automatic advertisement generation, mail generation or keyword-based news writing [ 1 ] .

Due to the wide range of applications of TEG, this task has attracted a large amount of research attention. Previous study mentioned that unlike machine translation and text summarization, in TEG task, the semantic resources contained in the input sequence are much smaller than those in the output sequence, and it is almost impossible to generate satisfied text without enough semantic resources [ 2 ] . Therefore, in order to improve the quality of generated texts, researchers have started to explore the introduction of different types of external resources. Some previous studies [ 2 , 3 , 4 ] incorporate knowledge from the commonsense knowledge base like ConceptNet [ 5 ] and HowNet [ 6 ] . They utilize different graph structure encoders to fully leverage the external information. However, some studies argue that the information in the training corpus is sufficient to generate high-quality text, so they focus on how to effectively leverage the information within the corpus [ 7 , 8 ] . Additionally, some other works focus on different aspects, such as the inconsistency between the training and inference processing [ 9 ] , the human writing conventions [ 10 ] , and the multiple perspectives of input information [ 11 ] .

Although these methods produced high-quality text, there are still two issues that need to be addressed in TEG. First, the existing methods fail to utilize the rich semantic knowledge in language models, resulting in unsatisfactory text quality. Second, previous methods excessively emphasize the importance of labeled text, thereby restricting the diversity of generated text.

To address these problems, we propose a novel content selection topic-to-essay generator based on the encoder-decoder framework. The generator uses a pre-trained GENIUS language model [ 12 ] and a copy mechanism with content selection module, applying a unique training method to protect the knowledge in GENIUS from being destroyed. GENIUS is trained using a unique sketch reconstruction pre-training task, which enables it to learn knowledge similar to the TEG task while other language models can’t. To enhance the diversity of generated texts and make full use of the rich semantic knowledge contained in GENIUS, we propose a content selection module to the generator, using the improved prefix tuning method to train. It also monitors the state of the decoder at all time steps to make sure that the generated text is always correlated with the topics. Like prefix tuning [ 13 ] , the knowledge in the model is preserved. Furthermore, we have released a new Chinese dataset NAES for the TEG task. This dataset includes news articles and essays on various topics, such as finance, society, and lifestyle. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has an average improvement of over 40% compared to SOTA methods for text diversity on all evaluation datasets, while maintaining a high level of topic-consistency.

2 Methodology

In Figure 2 , we present our proposed model, GCS-IPT, which utilizes a pre-trained G ENIUS model comprising of a copy mechanism with C ontent S election module, and is trained using the I mproved P refix- T uning approach.

2.1 Task Formulation

The TEG task takes a topic set T = { t 1 , t 2 , … , t m } 𝑇 subscript 𝑡 1 subscript 𝑡 2 … subscript 𝑡 𝑚 T=\{t_{1},t_{2},...,t_{m}\} italic_T = { italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , … , italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_m end_POSTSUBSCRIPT } consisting of m 𝑚 m italic_m topic words as input, aims to generate paragraph-level text E = { e 1 , e 2 , … , e n } 𝐸 subscript 𝑒 1 subscript 𝑒 2 … subscript 𝑒 𝑛 E=\{e_{1},e_{2},...,e_{n}\} italic_E = { italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , … , italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT } that is coherent with the input topics and n 𝑛 n italic_n is the token number of generated text. For example, as shown in Figure 1 , when given five topics: “we”, “like”, “birds”, “helping”, and “beauty”, a TEG model will generate paragraph-level text as shown in the figure.

2.2 Copy mechanism with Content Selection

The copy mechanism allows for additional attention to be given to the input sequence during the generation process:

At time step t 𝑡 t italic_t , the context vector c t subscript 𝑐 𝑡 c_{t} italic_c start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is calculated with the hidden state of the encoder h t subscript ℎ 𝑡 h_{t} italic_h start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT and the attention of the target sequence to source sequence α t superscript 𝛼 𝑡 \alpha^{t} italic_α start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT . And we get p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , the probability of selecting a word from the vocabulary where W 𝑊 W italic_W and b 𝑏 b italic_b are learnable hyperparameters in a fully-connected layer.

While the copy mechanism enables heightened attention to the topic words during generation, it fails to consider the accurate expression of diverse topic semantics in the resulting text. In order to address this, we propose the Content Selection module to compute the probability p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT .

Next, we select the helpful information for generation.

Finally, the probability p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is calculated as follows:

Similar to the traditional copy mechanism, the probability distribution for copying words from the input source sequence P c ⁢ o ⁢ p ⁢ y subscript 𝑃 𝑐 𝑜 𝑝 𝑦 P_{copy} italic_P start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_c italic_o italic_p italic_y end_POSTSUBSCRIPT can be obtained through attention α 𝛼 \alpha italic_α . For the current word e t subscript 𝑒 𝑡 e_{t} italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT to be generated, the words in the source sequence with higher attention scores for e t subscript 𝑒 𝑡 e_{t} italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT are more likely to be copied. Finally, the probability distribution for generating a word e 𝑒 e italic_e combines the probability distribution from the vocabulary and the probability distribution for copying words.

2.3 Improved Prefix-tuning

Throughout the training process, preserving the semantic knowledge within GENIUS is of utmost importance. Therefore, we opt for training it utilizing the prefix-tuning approach. Considering the complexity of the input text often varies in TEG task, which escalating proportionally with the count of topic words, we propose an enhanced variant of the prefix-tuning technique.

Specifically, prefix vector is a fixed-length vector, but different subvectors are trained based on the number of topics. Let n 𝑛 n italic_n represents the given number of topics. We obtain the initial index i ⁢ d ⁢ x 𝑖 𝑑 𝑥 idx italic_i italic_d italic_x for the subvector by applying a linear transformation to the initial state h 0 subscript ℎ 0 h_{0} italic_h start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 0 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT of the encoder. And a softmax normalization is applied to obtain probabilities. Finally, once the initial index and length of the subvector are determined, the selection of the subvector is also finalized.

2.4 Training

Given a set of topic words as input, a variable-length prefix is added to the front and the model then calculates the state and attention. At each time step of the generation stage, the states of both encoder and decoder are passed to the content selection module. This module computes the representation of the input topics and eventually generates a copying probability distribution. Finally, copying distribution integrates with the vocabulary probability distribution, generating the probability distribution for the output at the current time step. The objective function of the entire training process is to minimize the negative log-likelihood loss.

3 Experiments

3.1 Datasets

Public Available Dataset: We conduct experiments on the ZHIHU and ESSAY [ 14 ] public datasets. The number of topics used follows the same settings as [ 2 ] and the training set and test set are set to 25,000 and 2,000, respectively.

Self-Constructed Dataset: Due to the lack of diversity caused by the uniform style of open-source datasets for TEG, we contribute a new Chinese dataset News and Essays (NAES) 1 1 1 https://mega.nz/folder/5r12GIBb#UF1v6p50CwJOpI4tRssMxQ for the TEG task. This dataset includes topic news such as finance, social, culture and tourism, as well as high-scoring essays. We gather articles from publicly accessible online sources, choosing paragraphs that fall within the length range of 50 to 200 words. For extracting key phrases, we employ the YAKE algorithm [ 15 ] to extract 5 topics from each text. In addition, we select the top 100 most frequent topics from NAES. The training and test set is set to 18000 and 1400 data samples.

3.2 Evaluation Setup

Baselines We select MTA [ 14 ] , CTEG [ 2 ] , SCTKG [ 3 ] and GENIUS [ 12 ] as baselines. The first three models are specifically designed for TEG tasks and the SCTKG is the SOTA model. We draw inspiration from [ 16 ] and [ 17 ] , where the pre-training tasks of language models have a significant impact on the performance of downstream tasks. The knowledge in GENIUS learned from the sketch reconstruction task [ 12 ] is similar to what TEG tasks require. So we choose GENIUS as one of the baselines for TEG tasks. All experimental results are the average values of five experiments.

Implement Details We utilize genius-base-chinese 2 2 2 https://huggingface.co/beyond/genius-base-chinese . as the initialization parameters for our model. We implement changes to the model structure using PyTorch. Training is conducted for 50 epochs on a single 1080 Ti GPU. The Adam optimizer is employed, with an initial learning rate of 5e-6. During testing, a beam search decoding strategy is applied with a beam width set to 3. For model hyperparameters, we set prefix base length to 30, and the similarity threshold is set to 0.2.

Automatic Evaluation Similarly, based on previous work, we choose the following evaluation method: BLEU score [ 18 ] , Diversity (DIST-2) [ 19 ] , Consistency [ 2 , 3 ] sand Novelty [ 2 , 3 ] . BLEU can reflect the similarity between generated text and labels, so a higher BLEU score may limit diversity. However, considering that BLEU can to some extent reflect the quality of text, we still report this metric as a reference. Dist-2 and Novelty both reflect the diversity of generated text. Consistency, on the other hand, indicates whether the generated content is centered around the semantic of the input topic.

3.3 Performance Comparsion

The experimental results of automatic evaluation are presented in Table 1 . The results demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance on all metrics except the BLEU score in both the ZHIHU and ESSAY datasets. Particularly, TEG is an open-ended text generation task where the generated content should not heavily rely on the labeled text. At this level, a higher BLEU score may hinder the ability to generate diverse text. However, we still report the BLEU score because it can to some extent reflect the coherence of the generated texts by the model.

Our proposed model maintains an objective BLEU score while surpassing the SOTA method in terms of consistency. This indicates that our approach achieves high-quality text generation with impressive topic-consistency. Furthermore, our method outperforms the SOTA by 35.59% and 47.87% on the DIST-2 metric for the two public datasets, and surpasses the SOTA by 6.66% and 12.14% on the Novelty. These results demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of text diversity and novelty compared to the SOTA approaches.

Table 1 also presents the experimental results of several baseline methods compared to our model on NAES. Apart from a slight difference in BLEU compared to SCTKG (state-of-the-art), our model significantly outperforms existing methods in other metrics. Specifically, the baselines exhibit noticeable performance degradation on NAES compared to ZHIHU and ESSAY, whereas our model demonstrates a relatively smaller performance decline. This indicates that our method is more suitable for realistic corpus environments, showcasing stronger adaptability and robustness.

3.4 Ablation Study

Table 2 presents the ablation experiments. The GCS model represents the addition of a copy mechanism with a content selection module to the GENIUS. GCS-PT denotes the training of GCS using the original prefix-tuning method, while the complete model GCS-IPT refers to the training of GCS using our improved prefix-tuning method.

Due to the incorporation of the copying mechanism and content selection, the model considers not only the probability distribution of the vocabulary during generation but also the probability distribution of the input content. As a result, BLEU and Consistency are improved. With the help of prefix-tuning, which preserving the rich knowledge in language model, all evaluation metrics show improvement. Finally, the improved prefix-tuning method adapts to diverse input information by utilizing prefix vectors of different lengths based on the length of the input topic words. This adaptation enhances the performance in terms of DIST-2 and Novelty.

4 Conclusion

In this paper, we present a novel content selection module within a topic-to-essay model that incorporates a copy mechanism which integrates rich semantic knowledge in language model to the generation process. Additionally, we introduce an improved prefix tuning training process to further enhance the model’s performance by allowing the model to adapt to both simple and complex topic inputs. In addition, we contribute a large Chinese TEG task dataset that has multi-topic text. Experiments show that our model can generate more diverse, novel text while maintaining a high topic-consistency, and notably outperform other baselines in text diversity.

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Guest Essay

Kamala Harris Said She Owns a Gun for a Very Strategic Reason

By Adam Jentleson

Mr. Jentleson is a former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

At the presidential debate and on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has hardly sounded like the Marxist or the Communist that Donald Trump has accused her of being. She hasn’t even sounded particularly progressive. At various times, she has said that she backs fracking, taunted Mr. Trump for his weakness in the face of dictators and bragged about owning a gun — going so far as to tell Oprah Winfrey, “if someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

What she has been doing is a ruthlessly effective example of vice signaling from the left: deviating in memorable ways from the “virtue signaling” that has come to define Democrats in the eyes of many Americans. “Virtue” and “vice” here are not to be taken literally. Rather, they refer to the world as seen through the rigid beliefs and commitments of college-educated whites, a narrow yet influential slice of the Democratic coalition whose views of what constitutes virtue are not necessarily shared by most Americans and who police any deviations as vice. Yet it is precisely those breaks from the fold that signal something powerful to the average voter.

Vice signaling is not just a tactic, but a way to resolve a paradox that has dogged Democrats for a decade: Many Democratic policy positions are popular, but when it comes to ideology, most American voters feel closer to Republicans. President Biden pursued and enacted popular policies, yet his approval ratings have been historically low. Asked to place themselves on an ideological scale, more Americans see Mr. Biden as too liberal than see Mr. Trump as too conservative. Nor is this tendency isolated to Mr. Biden: More Americans place themselves closer to Mr. Trump than to Ms. Harris on ideology, and in 2016, voters saw Mr. Trump as more moderate than Hillary Clinton.

The reason is that despite embracing many popular policies, Democrats have fallen out of step with the American people on something larger: their approach to the world. Americans are mavericks, yet Democrats have come to be seen as rigid, a party defined by lawn signs that tell passers-by not to bother approaching unless they agree on a litany of issues — the orthodox party in a heterodox country. To win, Ms. Harris will need to ignore calls to return to the orthodox fold and continue signaling strategic breaks from it.

Vice signaling means courting healthy public controversy with the enforcers of orthodoxy — the members of interest groups who on many critical issues have let themselves off the hook for accurately representing the views and interests of those they claim to speak for. This tack is not to be confused with what is known in politics as a “Sister Souljah moment,” a repudiation of a part of one’s own coalition. Vice signaling is more flexible because the goal is not to put down any specific interest or cause but rather to show that you are someone whom people can talk to and not worry about feeling judged.

The version Ms. Harris should embrace is distinct from the one some on the right have developed, which embraces cruelty and disdain toward liberal social norms and provokes outrage pell-mell for the sole purpose of “owning the libs.” It shows that someone will govern for all Americans, not just the hypereducated. It doesn’t even have to be about issues — it can be about drinking, popping a nicotine pouch or letting your kids have too much screen time and eat McDonald’s.

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