Co-authored by Vinod Rajasekaran

According to Maclean’s writer Andrew Potter, there is no real difference between youth today and Boomers. In his view, “what we interpret as features of a cohort, a group defined by some common values and life experience … are really just life-stage effects – traits or values you have in virtue of being a certain age.”

Potter’s article is only the latest salvo in a series of exchanges over Gen Y.

In replying to it, we want to deal with three quite different questions that are entangled in the discussion: Are young people really disengaged? Is the fall in voter turnout a sign of their overall disengagement? Are young people really somehow different from earlier generations? Let’s take these one at a time.

First, many commentators seem to assume that youth today are not interested in what, broadly speaking, we will call “civic engagement” or “public service.” Potter, for example, concludes that only when they “have families of their own, mortgages, back trouble, and sickly parents” will they take an interest in “child care, health insurance, pensions, and so on.”

In fact, recent studies by Canadian Policy Research Networks, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the Canada West Foundation, and DECODE all arrive at a different conclusion. Youth are engaged in all kinds of issues facing their communities, countries, and the world – from mentoring kids to taking care of the environment. However, as these studies are careful to note, they often do so in non-conventional ways.

So it is wrong to say that youth are disengaged, let alone lazy, as one columnist recently charged. For the moment, let's leave it at this: In discussing disengagement, commentators should be more careful about the standards they are using to define the term, and what evidence they have for their claims.

This brings us to the second point. As everyone knows, voter turn-out among youth is way down. Many commentators cite this as evidence of disengagement. But does this really tell us anything special about young people? After all, voter turnout is declining among all demographic groups, not just young people.

In fact, declining voter turnout suggests to us that something is deeply wrong with our politics, not this or that generation. Perhaps youth were simply quicker to recognize the problem. Nevertheless, we agree that this development is very worrying. Voting is a lynch-pin of democratic government. Without it there is no clear way of choosing governments with any legitimacy. But this seems to be a problem of everyone’s making, not just Gen Y.

So what about the third question: Is Potter right? Is Gen Y pretty much like Gen X or Boomers, just a few years behind in their development? There is good reason to think they are different.

The last three decades have been a time of profound social change. New forces, including globalization, new technologies, higher education, population growth, and increased mobility are bringing about changes that are rightly described as “transformational” – to use that worn-out word.

This new world has been described as flat, complex, post-modern, intercultural, hyper-dynamic, technologically-driven, and environmentally stressed. Whatever the epithet, it seems clear that we are at some form of watershed in history. Fifty years from now, we believe historians will have marked it as such.

This has an interesting implication. There is a vast literature in anthropology and sociology describing how the values, attitudes, goals, and expectations of the members of a society are intimately connected to its basic structure. As a result, you can’t change the society without changing its members. If so, isn’t it reasonable to assume that a generation shaped by this new world somehow will be different from those who have gone before it?

While this observation doesn’t prove that Gen Y-ers are different, we think it should at least give pause to those Boomers who still tend to look on the world as though it were created in their image. It is not. It is changing – indeed, it has already changed. This raises a final, very intriguing question: Just how might this new generation – and ones yet to come – be different from those that came before them? What is it really like to come of age in the world today?

We don’t have an answer to this yet. We are, however, committed to pursuing the question. The Public Policy Forum thus has recently created PPX – an open network of young Canadians from all regions and walks of life who come together to share, deliberate, and generate ideas of their own on how to tackle global and Canadian challenges. Now we plan to expand this work by launching a national dialogue on youth engagement in public service.

It will be very interesting to see what all this tells us about generational differences.