You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman. My guest today is Bobby Duffy. His new book is The Generation Myth.

Why, when you're born, matters less than you think.

This is a great book, great debunking book of a lot of myths about generations.

Bobby Duffy is one of the UK's most respected

social researchers. He's a professor of public policy and director of the

Policy Institute at Kings College London. Duffy previously directed public affairs and global research at ipsoes

Mori, M-O-R-I and the ipso Social Research Institute which among other

initiatives ran the world's largest study of public

perception. He's the author of why we're wrong about nearly everything which we

discussed a couple years ago on this podcast. His research has been covered by the

Washington Post, the Economist, Financial Times, courts, NBC, BBC, and

elsewhere he lives in London. So this is a really interesting subject of going through the

different generations, silent generation, baby boomers, generation ex-millenials

and Gen Z. And what we can conclude or can't conclude about

those there's a lot of myths. The three main points that I take that presented in

the book is that there's three different major effects here.

Lifestyle effects that is people change over time as they get older.

Period effects, that is things that happen during a particular area of time of your life that are big like a

war and economic recession, pandemic, and cohort effects that leave particular generations

imprinted by specific experiences that happen at a crucial point

when their attitudes are forming, say, young, late teens, early adulthood. So the

problem scientists like Bobby have is that they interact. So teasing

...