I’ve spent a lot of 2023 working on fascinating projects that have technological change at their core.
At Trajectory, we’ve conducted futures analysis on the potential development of genomic medicine and helped organisations understand what the landscape of transport will look like in 2035 (more electric cars, more driverless modes, more automated transport systems). We’ve written reports on the unmet promise of virtual realities and scoped out the likely future take up of eVTOL. AI has been part of the discussion in every project (as it has been for a decade, it’s just discussed more breathlessly now).
But in all of these projects, technological change is only one part of the future. It’s often the most exciting and the shiniest part of it – so it captures the imagination. But a lot of change comes from other places.
Demographics is one of those places. It’s much more slow moving than technology, and there isn’t a zeitgeist-capturing Silicon Valley firm releasing product updates in it every few months to keep us hooked. Demographics largely concerns people who are already alive ageing slowly and occasionally moving from one part of the world to another.
Here’s a chart showing the whole population of the UK, grouped into typical generational cohorts.1
There are five generations in adulthood at the moment, including one (Gen Z) that are straddling adulthood and adolescence. There’s another one waiting in the wings (Gen Alpha) who’ll have the wonderful task of making Gen Zs feel old and uncool in about 10 years – just as the Gen Zs are doing to Gen Y/Millennials now.
But there were also five generations in adulthood a decade ago, as the oldest Gen Zs started leaving education and entering the world of work. And there’ll be five generations in adulthood at the end of this decade. Because we’re living longer, in the 2030s we’ll have six generations in adulthood, as the Silent Generation watch Generation Alpha start making Gen Z feel stale.
All of this is very slow moving and predictable. In fifty years’ time someone might have a version of the chart above showing Millennials where the Silent Generation are and Gen Z where the Boomers are, with a slew of as-yet-undefined generational cohorts following them.
But occasionally, demographic trends (or at least, trends related to demographics) can move quickly. Here’s a chart from British Social Attitudes showing the proportion of people, organised by the decade in which they were born, who say ‘homosexuality is wrong’.
This one of my favourite charts. It’s a fantastic piece of analysis (the authors of the chapter are Alison Park and Rebecca Rhead, the original report can be accessed here) and it’s also a positive, progressive story. But it also confounds expectations.
One of the most common myths out there is that we get more conservative as we get older.
It’s possible that on some economic measures that’s true – we’re more likely to own a house and have savings at 50 than 20, and at that age we probably start caring a bit more about the security of pension funds too. But the lesson from the British Social Attitudes chart is that we don’t always get more conservative on social issues.
Some don’t change. The cohorts born in the 1910s and 1920s were just as homophobic in 1993 and 2003 as they were in 1983. But every subsequent cohort not only starts more tolerant, but generally got more tolerant as time wore on. The cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular, got massively less prejudiced as they aged.
The demographic trend we’d expect to see is on the left of the - each cohort starts off a little more socially liberal and eventually, by process of replacement, society gets more liberal too. But the less-expected trend is the change between left and right of the graph. The change in values, combined with the change in demographics, has taken a slow trend and made it faster.
What does this mean?
It’s easy – and fun – to imagine a future made radically different by sudden leaps forward in technology. Sometimes they happen, but even remarkable, era-defining technological progress takes a long time to really stretch across a population. In the UK, it took 30 years for the internet reach more than 90% of households. In the same time, we went from having a Conservative government enacting Section 28 to a Conservative Government that brought in equal marriage.
Usually, demographic change isn’t quick. And it’s often independent of other forces too.
There are many, many consistencies in generational or cohort analysis. There will always be multiple generations in society, often with different attitudes and needs, and no single cohort defines the population.
Every generation is the future once. Watch out Gen Z, the Alphas are coming for you. This means that the social and digital spaces each generation inhabits age with them – when you’re 18, you don’t drink in the same pub as your parents. It’s why Gen Z don’t use Facebook and why Gen Alpha won’t use TikTok.
Definitions of these vary. We define Millennials as starting in 1981 and ending in 1995. Others might have them running 1980-1996.