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Super Mario defeats the pop-demographics peddlers

I welcome Mario Dumont and Bernard Lord to the centre ring of our country's political discourse, and sincerely hope that 32-year-old Mario will win the Quebec premiership and Bernard, the 34-year-old New Brunswick premier, will decide to run for federal Progressive Conservative leader.

No, I have not been captivated by these young men's political views, which fall squarely under the usual Canadian recipe of fiscal thick-crustedness leavened with a few pinkish social sprinkles. Nor am I especially turned on by their alleged charisma, which might earn them a grope at an insurance-company office party.

What excites me about these guys is that they may finally put an end to the pseudo-science of generationism, an annoying demographic parlour game that almost ruined the 1990s. Yes, Maclean's may decide to proclaim on its cover that Generation X has entered the big leagues, but these two specimens actually disprove everything ever claimed about my co-generationists.

Mario and Bernard do not have issues with authority. They are not full of anger and world-wariness. They are not sarcastic or even mildly irreverent. They have no discernible piercings or tattoos. They are not unmotivated, or underemployed. Their names do not tend to attract the adjectives "edgy" or "extreme," and they could be called politically correct only in the usual Canadian party-politics sense.

In short, they are prosperous guys in their 30s who act and think pretty much the way prosperous guys in their 30s always have. That they are members of certain social classes, genders and geographic regions is far more important than their membership in a supposed generation -- which, in reality, was never anything more than an age group.

If we're lucky, they will make everyone stop believing in generations, attributing qualities to them, making up cute names for them. (Pity children born in the 1980s, who have been dubbed either Gen-Y'ers or Echo Boomers, names so infelicitous that they could be applied to Canadian currency.)

If so, we will be able to remember the whole thing as a strange little fad, the astrology of our age. Like astrology, generation-speak is based on the belief that people born at the same time will be the same kind of people. And like astrology, it's sometimes coincidentally right, either because human nature follows patterns (we're rebellious in our 20s, ambitious or complacent in our 30s, anxious in our 40s), or because people start acting the way they're told to act (if I'm in Gen-X, why don't I have a tattoo?).

The idea that generations have their own, distinct cultures is a strange perversion of the noble but dusty old science of demographics. Demographers, the real-life kind who do the empirical heavy lifting for geographers and social scientists and United Nations commissions, have more important things to do.

If you leaf through the pages of Population Studies or Demography, two major journals of the field, you'll find such exciting titles as "The elimination of contraceptive acceptor targets and the evolution of population policy in India." You'll also find, beneath the thickets of jargon, some really interesting questions: The world's population is going to stop growing in a couple decades, but people everywhere are also living longer, so are our health services going to be even more taxed? Is global violence endemic because half the world's population is now under 25?

Such questions are lost on the demographers who provide the newspaper headlines -- "Aging boomers push sales of adult diapers" -- and trend-crunching bestsellers. This lot's journal is American Demographics, a glossy monthly that is to serious demographics what Penthouse is to gynecology. It caters not to the academics and policy wonks who follow real-life demographics, but to marketing people.

The folks who read American Demographics are the ones who dreamed up "Generation Y" to describe the kids of the Second World War baby boom. While the boomers were a very real phenomenon, the bulge in the population pyramid caused by their late-arriving children should be of concern only to the school-board officials who buy the portable classrooms. Culturally, they do not represent any kind of disjunction in the continuum of postwar youth culture -- unless you happen to be a marketing executive.

"It's no surprise, then, that Gen Y is on the radar of just about anyone who has a product to sell," writes Seema Nayyar, the editor of American Demographics. "If companies can figure out today what will make the current 15-year-old nostalgic at age 22, or what kinds of characters today's 9-year-old will want to emulate as an adult, they will gain insight into what kinds of products, services and messages will resonate with them as lifelong consumers."

There we have it. Through the magic of marketing, a dry population trend is nurtured into a flowering, distinct cultural community. And guess what: The Generation Y kids, now in their late teens and early 20s, are being hailed as a new and distinct generational culture, simply because they're acting like kids in their teens and 20s.

A headline on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Style section summed it up: "Humiliation Sells: Dark, Painful -- and Funny -- Television Ads Mean Gen. Y's Anti-P.C. Attitude Has Arrived."

I remember, a dozen years ago, when my own generation's dark, painful, anti-P.C. attitude arrived, with a great flourish of marketing hoopla and pop-demographic folderol. Now, thanks to the pale visages of Mario and Bernard, we can put it back in the drawer.

dsaunders@globeandmail.ca