I think we can (sometimes) distinguish between age (life-cycle) effects and political generational (one kind of cohort) effects; I’d say changes in voting behaviour among older people in the UK speak to a political generational effect.

Although there are certainly age, class and gender components to the types of dancing, in the USA at least, the generational effect is overwhelming.

My silent generation father and mother would describe to me (a tail end Joneser or late baby-boomer) 20 years later how deeply they felt the change they saw from their generation when chaperoning a dance in California in 1962.

Needless to say…they have never recovered.

Quiggan’s critique sloopy social science seems to apply to all of soical science: that is: it sucks at predicting change.

Other than in marketing and sociology, these labels mean little other than to label and allegedly predict behavior, just as we use jew, mick, chinese, Indian, and a lot of other biased and bigoted labels.

I missed the deadline to post on the Discworld novels.

“Going Postal” is, as neil said, an attack on libertarianism.

“Jingo” is a great attack on, well, unilateral militarism.

“Guards, Guards” includes some great stuff on a police state (including the amazing quote by the dictator to “never build a prison you wouldn’t want to be thrown in.”)

‘Hippies’ and computers: it’s true that Bill Gates started at a very high level, and then took off from there into the stratosphere. His parents were part of the local Seattle elite, and as a boy he was comfortable around the prominent businessmen and politicians who showed up at his parents’ parties. That’s also why he got an early exposure to computers: through the pull of influential parents, his private school got a connection to a local mainframe, something very unlikely to happen in a public school.

But didn’t the ‘hippie’ generation have something to do with fueling the computer homebrew culture out of which microcomputers arose? Apple Computer and other companies rose out of that culture, which was not at all commercially oriented. Gates saw the business opportunities this presented, and jumped on it with both hands. Does anyone know of any solid research done on this?

Aidan: Your link is evidence against the notion of generational psychology. As the link would have it, once upon a time everyone, regardless of generation, thought you could overcome trauma by forgetting it. Now everyone, regardless of generation, thinks that trauma permanently scars you.

Well, apart from Herman Kahn, that is.

The first computers, and even the first microprocessors, were the products of earlier generations, but the great proportion of the programmers who made them useful were those who came of age when they were introduced.

Boomers like me have only started putting their hands on the levers of power in the last decade. The results so far, at least in the U.S., have veered between mediocre and disastrous, and the future looks grim.

Nevertheless, some remarkably useful work has been done, as demonstrated by the means by which you are reading this.

#

1944

I was born under the screams of a mushroom filled sky

to the hiss of a thousand locomotives

to the reek of Buchenwald ovens

to the wild-eyed estacy of skeletons dancing in the streets

to the cooing girls gracing aluminum-nosed superfortresses

to the crackling radios and the comforting hum of white refrigerators

to the roar of hot rods and roadsters and coupes

to the ribboned crossbones with skulls donning pink Easter bonnets

to the raised stigmata hands before a heedless world

to the aspen glow of a bonfire in a cowering Berlin

to the fluttering flag on a volcanic isle caught by a gritty Speed Graflex

to the Kilroy that was here and there and everywhere

to the lightning punches of Graziano

and I awoke from the warm watery world to a cry

from lungs invaded by the gasps of a million years.
—Bro. Bartleby