Is it an age thing, or a cohort thing?
I’ve been working on a genuinely fascinating project for an investment bank, and one of the things we’re looking into is the cultural narratives around wealth, investing and what we might call “the good life”.
One thing we keep seeing show up is the huge amount of research around this topic with a deep generational lens. For example, we see tons on Gen Z, Millennials and here and there the odd Gen X and Boomer piece of research. But they all seem to lack something.
There’s very little research that answers a question my strategy lead likes to ask often: is this an age thing, or a cohort thing? What this means is, are we saying for example that Gen Z want to be more self-employed, or are we saying most 20-25s tend to want this before they realise it’s probably ok to take a corporate job in the meantime?
This isn’t to discredit the research that’s out there, but we are severely lacking more longitudinal investigations to help us understand if what we attribute to something uniquely about “the newer generations” can simply be explained by “things that younger people have always done”.
I also appreciate the context through which Gen Z grew up will no doubt influence some new attitudes and behaviours that are indeed novel. But every time i see something about how idealistic the youth today is, i can’t help but wonder if idealism always defined the young.
Which means yes, we can still make this claim about younger people today, and no doubt this idealism is expressed through behaviours that were simply not possible 10 or 20 years ago. But to say this is so unique to a particular group of younger people today, without comparing with a similar dataset from a generation ago, feels a bit naive.
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