Generational Progression

Millennials Rising ascribes seven "core traits" to the Millennial cohort, which are:
special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. A
2009, Chronicle of Higher Education report commented Howe and Strauss based these
core traits on a "hodgepodge of anecdotes, statistics, and pop-culture references" and
on surveys of approximately 600 high-school seniors from Fairfax County, Virginia, an
affluent county with median household income approximately twice the national
average. The report described Millennials Rising as a "good-news revolution" making
"sweeping predictions" and as describing Millennials as "rule followers who were
engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant", commenting the book gave educators
and "tens of millions of parents, a warm feeling. Who wouldn't want to hear that their
kids are special?"
General
In 1991, Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek that the book Generations was a
"provocative, erudite and engaging analysis of the rhythms of American life". However,
he believed it was also "an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand
scholarly scrutiny." He continued, "these sequential 'peer personalities' are often silly,
but the book provides reams of fresh evidence that American history is indeed cyclical,
as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others have long argued." But he complained, "The
generational boundaries are plainly arbitrary. The authors lump together everyone born
from 1943 through the end of 1960 (Baby Boomers), a group whose two extremes have
little in common. And the predictions are facile and reckless." He concluded: "However
fun and informative, the truth about generational generalizations is that they're generally
unsatisfactory." Arthur E. Levine, a former president of the Teachers College
of Columbia University said "Generational images are stereotypes. There are some
differences that stand out, but there are more similarities between students of the past
and the present. But if you wrote a book saying that, how interesting would it be?"
In response to criticism that they stereotype or generalize all members of a generation
the authors have said, "We've never tried to say that any individual generation is going
to be monochromatic. It'll obviously include all kinds of people. But as you look at
generations as social units, we consider it to be at least as powerful and, in our view, far
more powerful than other social groupings such as economic class, race, sex, religion
and political parties."
Gerald Pershall wrote in 1991: "Generations is guaranteed to attract pop history and
pop social science buffs. Among professional historians, it faces a tougher sell. Period
specialists will resist the idea that their period is akin to several others. Sweeping
theories of history are long out of fashion in the halls of ivy, and the authors' lack of
academic standing won't help their cause. Their generational quartet is "just too
wooden" and "just too neat," says one Yale historian. "Prediction is for prophets,"
scoffed William McLoughlin (a former history professor at Brown), who said it is wrong
to think that "if you put enough data together and have enough charts and graphs,
you've made history into a science." He also said the book might get a friendlier
reception in sociology and political science departments than the science department.
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