Katherine Davidson: Melting the millennial myth

‘Not so special, snowflake’

clock • 6 min read

Are millennials genuinely so different from previous generations? Katherine Davidson takes a closer look at the results of new research challenging that widely held view

Last month I was invited to present at a conference in Berlin, for which I spent a couple of days preparing and then got up at 4am to fly over and attend. The speaker before me confidently told the audience that millennials lacked their elders' work ethic so would drag down productivity and GDP growth. As I took to the stage, I rather wondered why I bothered … Millennials, broadly defined as the generation born between 1980 and 2000, have grown accustomed to these sweeping generalisations. We are blamed for weak new car sales, the death of bricks-and-mortar retail, rising debt and flaggi...

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