2080: Cohort and Age Effects

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Cohort and Age Effects

Title text: Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

Explanation

Another of Randall's many Pet Peeves, this time it's statistics. It is the first in more than four years, since 1368: One Of The.

"Millennials" are the generation of Westerners who were born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, whereas baby boomers are the generation born during the "baby boom", a period of high birth rates from the late 1940s to early 1960s. A common headline on news websites is "Millennials are killing the X industry" where X is a product whose sales have dropped in recent years, such as jungle gyms for kids. One of the most famous is the diamond industry, where a combination of the wage gap, stigma over conflict diamonds, increased knowledge of (in Randall's words) "The entire industry being built on a scam"<s> "complicated gemstone market" and less desire to get married early has seen millennials buying less diamond jewelry than previous generations.

Randall spoofs this idea. In the comic, Cueball, as a news anchor, presents a heading which opens his story by asking if millennials are killing the industry of surgical joint replacements, illustrating it with numbers of joint replacement procedures among millennials compared to baby boomers. The joke is that millennials are simply too young for most of them to need joint replacements (which are usually used to treat senile osteoarthritis), so most people will see that so there really isn't a news story here. Randall is using this example to highlight that this kind of story is ridiculous. Millennials will likely need joint replacements in the future as they get older, potentially keeping sales of joint replacements at close to their current rate.

A cohort effect is a cultural difference between generations (such as buying fewer diamonds), whereas an age effect is one that is simply related to getting older (such as getting arthritis). Joint replacement rates are an age effect, but the newscast is presenting them as if they were a cohort effect. (More correctly, the table rows would be labelled e.g. “people aged 53–72” and “people aged 17–36”.)

The title text points out that although numbers of millennials receiving joint replacements are low, they are higher than the numbers of baby boomers who received them at the same age—i.e. in their 20s—due to advances in medical diagnosis and technology in the last 50 years, as well as (in some countries at least) better access to healthcare. This statistic can be used to create a headline which is the reverse of the one in the comic, namely "millennials are getting more joint replacements than ever". Randall notes that you could therefore use either headline to back up your argument, depending on the agenda you are trying to present.

Transcript

[Cueball as a news anchor is sitting at a desk with hands folded in front of him on the table.]

Cueball: Tonight: Are Millennials killing the joint replacement industry?

[To the left of Cueball is a presentation which includes a two by two table with a header above the table. Each of the two rows and columns are labeled, with rows entitled 'Baby Boomers' and 'Millennials', and columns entitled 'Knee' and 'Hip']

Operation rate per 100,000

Baby Boomers:

Knee: 720

Hip: 390

Millennials:

Knee: 1

Hip: 3

[Caption below the panel:]

Stats Pet Peeve: People mixing up cohort effects and age effects.

Trivia

• In the original title text there were two mistakes which were soon corrected. Here is the original title text with the removed word in <s>strike through and the final version with the added word in bold:
  • Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials are getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

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Discussion

I'm going to assume the millennial injuries were covered on a news network. 162.158.63.94 16:36, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Eh, millenials spend their entire lives sitting in front of a screen (yes, like you are right now), unlike the boomers that actually went out and did stuff. Millenial joints never get used, so they will never get replaced. 162.158.90.36 18:11, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Not true. Ok, true with the screen, but not true with the sitting. The smartphones and tablets ARE getting usable now ... although that will more influence the generation after millenials I guess ... -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:21, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Anyone else notice the grammar error in the title text? There's an extra word in the headline text: 'Why are millennials are getting...', where an extra "are" is inserted in the text. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 18:54, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

There's also a missing "on" -- "depending which trend...". Wait, the comic has just been updated to fix both issues. The original was "Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials are getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending which trend fits your current argument better." 19:53, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

I have added the corrected text to the comic explanation and made a trivia about it. --Kynde (talk) 22:08, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Is there a hidden attempt to make us feel old again, by noting that there are actually people from the millenials that are getting joints replaced already?`Or am I just looking for it? ;-) --Kynde (talk) 22:02, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

I just assumed those were non-aging related injuries (ski crashes, extreme sports injuries, suicide attempts, kneecappings, that kind of thing). 1982 isn't that old. 108.162.219.244 22:25, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Us Millennials are going to solve a lot of today's problems by about the time our kids become instant-gratification 30-somethings and robot apocalypse and genetically engineered supervirus terrorism become a significant possibility. 162.158.63.22 23:05, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Ehmmm ... robot apocalypse in traditional sense is unlikely to ever be a possibility - see What-if 5. Programming errors with causalities in millions, on the other hand ... -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:21, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

There was yet another round of articles about millennials killing certain markets by not buying the product; The overriding correlation? Lack of money. There are some products & services younger generations just aren't interested in, but economically speaking, millennials have less to spend overall.

I have made an attempt at fixing the table in the transcript. Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but it's quite difficult to find a way to express the information without using a table - I understand the reasons why tables in the transcript are bad, but there is also reason why tables are good for communicating information! 162.158.34.172 22:19, 13 December 2018 (UTC)