Bobby Duffy

Who they are

Duffy is a survey researcher by training and career. His earlier post at the head of the Ipsos Social Research Institute and his present post at the King's College London Policy Institute both sit close to large-scale survey work. That background shapes his book. Its evidence is mostly survey and cohort data, including Ipsos series such as Global Trends, Tech Tracker and the Issues Index, the General Social Survey, British Social Attitudes, Eurobarometer and British government statistics, and it includes a survey of thirty countries commissioned for the book.

The vault's reading of Generations flags what that means for anyone citing it. It is a data-led synthesis, sounder than most writing on generations, but it leans on its author's own datasets. Roughly one note in six in the book's apparatus is a survey series, many of them Ipsos datasets Duffy ran, and about one in seven is peer-reviewed. Several figures come from news and web pages accessed in April 2021 and may have moved. The sensible way to use the book is to treat it as a careful synthesis of survey trends, to quote his Ipsos analysis as his analysis, and to cite the original paper or official series for any statistic that matters.

Key papers

Duffy's central work for this site is a book and not a paper.

Duffy, B. (2021). Generations: Does When You're Born Shape Who You Are? Atlantic Books. An introduction and eleven chapters applying the period, lifecycle and cohort method to money, housing, work, health, sex, culture, politics and climate.

In Are Generational Differences Real, three passages are used: the three-effects method and the Spanish life-satisfaction example (p. 95), the account of the claim that Millennials hold a twelve-second attention span and Generation Z an eight-second one, which he traces to a Microsoft Canada report that cites Statistic Brain, which gives no data (p. 84), and the Ipsos stereotype surveys (pp. 245-248).

Key ideas

The method is the idea. Duffy argues that any pattern in survey data can come from how old people are, what is happening at the time, or when they were born, and that only by separating the three can anything true be said about a generation. Pundits who pick one of the three keep getting predictions wrong.

His second idea concerns stereotypes. In Ipsos surveys, Millennials were described as materialistic, selfish, lazy and arrogant in 2017 and as work-centric, well educated and ambitious in 2019, once Generation Z was available as an answer. He reads the traits as age-based clichés about the young that transfer to whichever cohort is newest, and treats the habit of judging the latest young cohort as worse than any before as a constant. The figures are Ipsos publications and his own analysis, so they are company-reported data and not an independent test.

His third idea is that the cohort gaps that do matter are economic. He argues that income growth has stalled for younger cohorts while housing wealth has accrued to older ones, so that what holds the young back is housing and not character. The figures behind this argument are survey and official series that the vault has not rechecked, and it is his argument.

He also treats much of what looks like Millennial rejection of marriage, children and early independence as delay tied to money and stage of life, with milestones arriving later and not being refused, and he argues for institutions that speak for future generations. Both are reported here as his positions.

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