Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I was being half glib. But you're right - you could assess different generations' beliefs about each other cross-sectionally, without doing a multi-decade panel study. As long as you're disciplined about not trying to use it to judge who's right or wrong...

We know from the best data that Sanjay cited that 1) there are no real, big shifts in each generation, that 2) older and younger folk are different, and that 3) older folk have faulty memories. Given those 3 I'd put $ on the codgers continuing to make $ by disparaging the kids

I think the data is kinda interesting, but I don't think it answers (or is meant to answer) the questions I'm trying to ask

It is tough to find good data for these questions which are great questions btw.

Yeah, and frankly I don't really know how to feel about standard survey methods... a lot of the time, they're sort of like a sociological version of the pain scale: nobody really knows what a "1" or a "10" is supposed to be, but sure, I guess I'm a 6.

Now you are getting into nerdy territory—are measures used across cohorts equivalent; do they measure the same thing? It is a doable analysis that is most often ignored.

I think this sort of highlights the need to ground claims about population traits to some kind of measurable behavior, e.g. if people are becoming more narcissistic, how might that be reflected in crime/social service/employment data, etc.?