Generations involve millions of people. They do more than help individuals and guide small groups. In countries where they exist they can rally portions of the whole population their same age. The power of a generation arises when millions are synchronized and decide to do something at the same time. We have seen that a few people won’t join in with their generation. This lesser group won’t participate in a new generational action. But a large group could easily include 80 percent of the population. This will be a very large number of people.
Researchers who look at this are doing ‘demographic’ analysis. One age group that is doing new things in large numbers is people in their twenties. In the later twentieth century, those who were going to marry usually made their choice of partner when they were between 25 and 30 years old. Here is a large group of people coming under the influence of a big new generation. Sociologist Orlando Patterson (1998) analyzed Americans of European descent who were at this marriage making age.
A little historical background is useful here. Earlier in the twentieth century European Americans usually married a partner descended from their own country of origin. Back then, descent from a different European country was disliked and a potential mate of different origin was disregarded as a marriage partner. For many decades, and because there existed no media generations before mid-century, Euro-Americans remained endogenous and married only with their own kind.
But around 1970, the first true generation, Baby Boomers, had enough cohesion to rethink this and came to a shared agreement to be exogamous. Rejecting the previous personal life, millions of Euro-Americans started intermarrying and brought about a social transformation. People from within all European countries now regarded each other as one unified group with no significant differences.
Patterson notes how much better this acceptance of intermarriage was for everyone involved. The couples themselves gained a diversity of new social ties. He says, ‘Imagine an Irish or Jewish American groom’s first Sunday dinner with his Italian or WASP fiancee’s family.’ What we are seeing here is people gaining ideas about how to live. For example, having a spouse from different kind of family may teach new ways of doing business and earning a living. Individuals may discover new possibilities through education, science and new technology. And new partnerships may gain expectations that drop old routines, and create space for wider freedoms of new sharing of responsibilities. Families working better and living with new possibilities made for better personal lives.
At the same time, families becoming more innovative, creative and prosperous, boosted the nation as a whole. The United States gained newly united Euro-Americans who were the first to use the shared perceptions and better lives that came from belonging to the first real media using generation – The Baby Boomers. This demographic had large numbers, shared converging perceptions, created better lives for themselves, and gave America increased skills. Was this, the first generation with electronic communicated skills, simply lucky in timing so that they gave their country better ways of doing business and gained wider connections via exogamous marrying?
Patterson has given us an example of how membership of a generation in large numbers has allowed growth of wealth, increased income and widened understanding between groups of people.