COWEN: I don’t know. There are still democratic incentives in the system. I think people think in generational terms, maybe more than is warranted by the data. I’ve had this discussion with Peter Thiel. He talks about boomers and millennials and Generation X and Z. To me, it’s a continuum, and it’s the events at any point in time that matter a bit more, but I think people disagree on these questions. I don’t think it’s settled.
SCANLON: In terms of?
COWEN: How different different generations are, whether it’s a continuum or you have these fixed start and stop points.
SCANLON: Well, I think it’s in the cult-y thing that we were talking about earlier, where it’s like people want to belong to a certain generation. It’s easy to put yourself in a box that way.
COWEN: Yes, I’m never convinced that’s the right way to look at it.
SCANLON: I don’t think so. I think it creates more problems than answers.
Because generations are garbage
What great marketers actually do is create the conditions for the community to change and grow in the direction that it wants to go. Over time.
Economics views homo sapiens as rational animals (probably my primary beef with the topic of my major).
But we might be better thought of as rationalization animals.
Meet Effort Justification.
Effort invested = increased perceived value of an outcome.