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Kids these days

Published 2022-05-21

Millenials (I am one) have been the punching bag of the media for that past decade and a half. We've killed shopping malls, fast casual dining, I think someone mentioned canned tuna? So when I hear a complaint about how things are going downhill and how things used to be better I get pretty skeptical.

Complaints about the next generation have surely been around since there has been a next generation. I don't actually want to go look this up, but I wonder if these complaints are exacerbated by technological shifts. As younger people adopted texting as a primary mode of communication, we got breathless predictions of the downfall of the English language. Nevermind that these people were probably writing more than most generations before them. And that English, as a language, is bound to change and adapt to the needs of those using it.

Societies are large and as such have a lot of intertia. It's rare for changes to be large, and the changes are more likely to show up in less obvious areas. A paper I read a decade ago (and have since lost) described a range of ways that systems change. The easiest-to-institute but least effective involved changing incentives. At the other end of the spectrum, changing the culture around a system is very difficult but very effective. A step back from this is changing values.

So if we're worried that society is changing in a meaningful way, we should consider the mechanism of that change. Is it going to be a superficial change based on changing incentives? Probably not much to worry about. But if there's a shift in values or culture, then the change may be durable and be worth considering.