Book Review: Bobby Duffy, Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?

The subtitle question of Bobby Duffy’s book suggests a simple answer. ‘Does when you are born shape who you are?’ Yes, of course it does. The truth is rather more complicated and, rather than focussing narrowly on supposed generational differences, as so many have done, Duffy shows why such explanations of social change are so often simplistic, inaccurate, or plain crass. The book’s central message is that differences between generations are key to understanding social change, but only if we remember that not every difference between older and younger people is a generational difference. The enduring features that identify a generation are easily confused with the effect of maturation and ageing (life cycle effects) on one hand, and population-wide developments (period effects) on the other. These are elementary distinctions, but crucial ones. We see where confusion leads when we hear complaints about the cost of the state pension falling on the young, or when successive cohorts of teenagers are caricatured as generations of ‘narcissists’. These three dimensions – generational, period, and life cycle – overlap, and disentangling them requires an understanding of data and of context. Using a combination of existing and original data, Duffy highlights social trends in the UK, as well as the USA and Europe, showing how headlines that focus on just one of the three dimensions usually fail to tell the whole story. This goes for subjective ratings of ‘wellbeing’ as much as for objective trends in home ownership and education. Duffy sometimes settles on a generational explanation where I would hesitate to discount period and life cycle effects. To take a commonly used example, the wide gap in social media use between 17-year-olds and 70-year-olds is marked, but it is surely more remarkable that uptake has been so rapid across the population as a whole. Similarly, Duffy’s data show that the various generations’ attitudes to immigration, pollution, and many other hot political issues have moved in parallel. Differences certainly exist, but these would appear to be less important than the overall trend. The possibility of competing interpretations, though, is exactly what Duffy is highlighting: all three dimensions need to be accounted for. Duffy dispatches quickly with popular generational stereotypes but sticks to the commonly used categories (‘Millennial’, ‘Baby Boomer’, etc.). The boundaries between these groups are arbitrary, and Duffy recognises the limitations that this brings. A 1093077 SRO0010.1177/13607804221093077Sociological Research OnlineBook Reviews book-review2022