Generational generalizations gone wrong: how the guys who coined the word millennials missed the mark.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation - Book review

Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by Neil Howe and William Strauss, Vintage, 432 pages, $17.93

WHEN SOME parents of the 1980s and '90s started sending their kids to schools where uniforms were required, who could have imagined the social consequences? Those dress codes became a core part of that rising generation's identity--"a defining symbol of a much larger effort to clean up child behavior," as one history of the trend recalls--setting the stage for the "compulsory uniformed service" that those same kids joined en masse after they left college. Even outside the service corps, young people took to wearing '"general issue' clothing reminiscent of the G.I.s." With time the generation's conformist style came to represent a "collective grandeur," leading historians to see the millennials' school and soccer uniforms "as harbingers of monumental deeds that came later."

What's that? You say you don't remember any of that happening? Strange: It was predicted in such detail in Millennials Rising, a book published in the year 2000 by the court astrologers of the social sciences, William Strauss and Neil Howe. At that point, Strauss and Howe had spent nine years flogging a generation-based theory of social change that had just enough believability to hook an audience and just enough hubris to spin such wild speculations.

With this book, they turned their attention to the lives and worldviews of the millennials, their word--yes, they're the ones who inflicted the term on us--for Americans born in the two decades following 1982. Looking back from 2014, how have those theories held up?

The saga of the uniforms was at least presented in conditional language: a tale that "may emerge," not one that was sure to happen. At other times Strauss and Howe didn't even include that caveat. Under millennial pop culture, they assured us, music will be more melodic, sitcoms will be more wholesome, and young people will turn against "the gothic genre" with its "pessimistic view of man as victim," since that species of story "reminds them of what they sometimes find irritating about older generations." (These changes "will be fully locked in" by 2010.) Millennial courtship rituals will stress "deference to parents." Economic class "will rise above gender or race as a flashpoint for student political argument." And the new generation will create a more common culture, reacting against the social fragmentation of previous decades. Somehow I missed those...