QUESTIONING GENERATIONAL MORPHOLOGY.

Generational analysis as a first approximation to social science seems to make some sense: a cohort of people come of age under similar circumstances with shared experiences, and perhaps that gives the cohort a collective personality.

Not so fast, cautions John Quiggin.

Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups -- the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.

Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.

Most of the time, age effects are more important than cohort effects. The primary schoolers of the 1960s were very like the primary schoolers of today and, of course, totally different from the middle-aged parents they have become. The grandparents of today are more like their own grandparents than the bodgies and widgies they may have been in the 1950s.

The same applies to the standard rhetoric that one age group applies to another. For example, Mark Davis in Ganglands quotes various baby-boomer pundits denouncing the younger generation as 'slackers' and dole bludgers'. In the 1970s, precisely the same thing was being said about the younger members of the boomer cohort, then in their late teens and early twenties. In turn, much of the prejudice about dole bludgers was derived from the mixture of horror and envy which greeted members of the first wave of baby boomers, the hippies of the 1960s, with their rejection of the work ethic and indulgence in sex and drugs.

Age-group posturing of this kind changes in response to changing social circumstances, but only very slowly. As far as the role of younger age-groups is concerned, nothing much has changed since the discovery, or invention, of the teenager in the 1950s. The discovery resulted primarily from the arrival of near-universal high-school education, which suddenly created a uniform mass experience, with an associated set of common rituals.

That noted, to a first approximation, the approach still might work.

For the crucial decade from 16 to 25, however, common experiences related to growing up at a particular time can be very important. Whether the labour market is in a boom or a slump when you finish school can make a big difference to your subsequent career. For males, an even more important question is whether the years of military age coincide with a major war. Peacetime and wartime generations, or boom and slump generations, can be very different.

Vietnam was the perfect generational war. It was big enough that it required mass conscription of unenfranchised 18-year-olds (the lottery element and the deferment system only enhanced the unfairness of this), but small enough that it required no economic sacrifice from the adult electorate who voted for it. Still less was there any hint of centralised direction of labour or a general system of conscription for the entire male military-age population, as had been applied during World War II.

The generation gap was only heightened by the fact that the war took place during the last decade of an unprecedented (and subsequently unrivalled) 25-year boom. In times of high unemployment, there is a steady supply of young men willing to put on a uniform in return for a steady wage and full board, but few in the 1960s saw fighting the Vietcong as an appealing employment option. Even among those who went willingly, there was a sense of exploitation that has been reflected in the subsequent political rhetoric of Vietnam veterans, which is radically different from that of the older-generation RSL.

At least for males then, there is something in the idea of a 'Vietnam generation'. But the facile identification of this group with the 'baby boomers' is quite misleading. Demographically, the baby boom began in 1946 and petered out in the early 1960s, so that the beginnings of the baby boom and the Vietnam generation coincided. Economically and culturally, however, the Vietnam generation have a lot more in common with the 'baby bust' cohort, born during and just before World War II, than with baby boomers born after 1954.

Economically, the crucial dividing point was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of economic management in 1972, quickly followed by the oil shock of 1973. Those who entered the labour market before 1973 were faced with an abundance of jobs and easy access to career paths. They were mostly unaffected by the crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, which bore disproportionately on the young, that is, on the cohorts born between the late 1950s and the early 1970s.

It was not until the recession we had to have, from 1989 to 1992, and the waves of downsizing in the 1990s, that the end of postwar prosperity really hit the Vietnam generation and the baby bust cohort. Although the focus of policy attention remained firmly on youth unemployment, the real story of the 1990s was the disappearance of jobs for workers over 50, and particularly for men over 50. The employment rate for this group has fallen from nearly 100 per cent during the postwar boom to around 50 per cent today.

These days, though? "Outlived their usefulness," he concludeth.