John Quiggin mulls the disconnects between generations:
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.
The Dish 