These aren’t caveats; they’re disavowals

Heh. Andrew Ferguson takes sociologists to task in Millennial Mongers. More fundamentally it is a critique of sociologists playing fast and loose with anemic evidence to advance a preferred narrative without looking at counterfactuals. On a recent Pew report on Millennials:

In a seldom-cited section called “Some Caveats,” the authors first defend “generational analysis” as “often highly illuminating.” And yet, they go on, “there is an element of false precision in setting hard chronological boundaries between the generations. . . . [T]here are as many differences in attitudes, values, behaviors and lifestyles within a generation as there are between generations.” And even assuming such categories as “generations” exist in any identifiable sense beyond a chronological accident, “we can never disentangle completely the reasons generations differ.”

These aren’t caveats; they’re disavowals. If the category called “a generation” isn’t really a category, and if human life studied within the noncategories is too various to afford generalization, and if we can’t know whether the nongeneralizations were caused by the arbitrary labeling of the categories, then .  .  . isn’t this all rather pointless? Can’t we just pack it in and go home?

Best line perhaps? "It's never pretty when journalists cross-pollinate with academics."

It's never pretty when journalists cross-pollinate with academics. The hacks, clutching “data” and “studies,” take on the bogus authority of the eggheads, and the eggheads, startled by the thought that somebody might at last pay attention to their work, reach for the mindless sensationalism of the hacks. Entire segments of Good Morning America and the NBC Nightly News often result. Things only get worse when the academics and the journalists collide with marketing consultants, each of them appealing to the authority of the others. The sharp-edged world in which people live and act slips away, and a gauzy world of focus groups and surveys takes its place.

Ferguson's judgment of generational pundits?

People paid to say something when they have nothing to say.

Ouch