The Monkey Cage

There are some problems with this op-ed by Neil Howe. He begins by defining “the dumbest generation” as those born in “the late ‘50s to early ‘60s” — i.e. people “now in their late 40s [sic].” But if someone was born in 1957, which certainly counts as “the late ‘50s” in my book, that person is in his or her early 50s, not his or her late 40s — so right from the start, Howe is deliberately unclear and ambiguous about the chronological boundaries of the so-called “generation” he is writing about.
This calculated ambiguity continues when he refers to the lowest scores on the NAEP having been achieved by the group that took that test between 1961 and 1965.
What happened to the people born in the late 1950s? They’ve apparently dropped out of this section of the column.
Is this nit-picking? Applied to the ordinary op-ed piece, it might be. But this is a piece larded with statistics from the Census Bureau, from SAT results, NAEP results, etc. If you’re going to use these figures to support your case and lend an aura of gravity to what you write, as Howe does, then you owe it to readers to define precisely the chronological limits of the “generation” in question. Otherwise this remains just pop sociological analysis masquerading as serious social history — a verdict, incidentally, that might well apply to much of the rest of Howe’s work on so-called “generations”.

As a member of the class of 1981, I have no idea what you are talking about.

So george W. bush was in the smartest generation and Obama (and myself) the dumbest. That doesn’t bode well for the US. i guess i’ll give back my PhD, too as it must only really qualify as a second masters

Howe writes:

“With a lot more kids getting higher scores, the average SAT scores of Ivy League undergrads have jumped since the late 1970s — from 1230 to 1425 at the University of Pennsylvania, for example.”

but fails to note whether he accounts for the post-1994 re-centering, which adds about 100 points to the scores.

I assume he did not.