Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years. Millennials are the “ME ME ME GENERATION,” writes Joel Stein for the 2013 cover story of Time magazine, which is apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who were the plain old “Me Generation” (one me, no caps) and who created the “Me Decade” in the 1970s, and who coined the phrase, “But enough about me . . . what do you think about me?” in the 1980s when they were raising the next narcissists, Generation X. Sometimes you get the sense that these magazines’ cultural writers have very little experience with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their grand analyses based on what people they know in the gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young person that magazine writers come across most frequently are magazine interns. Because the media industry is high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening—those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you. To Stein’s credit, he has some sociological research to make his case—he brings “the cold, hard data.” However, much of his data can be countered by other data. For example, Stein writes: “Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. Yes, people are marrying later and the economy sucks. The unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, a full point lower, if Washington—you might know them as “old people”—hadn’t implemented spending cuts in 2011, The New York Times reports. As for laziness, the chart of cumulative change in total economy productivity and real hourly compensation since 1995 shows that as worker productivity has soared from 18.5% (2002) to 37.6% (2011), wages have remained stagnant or dropped for different groups of workers. We’re all working hard, we’re just not getting paid. But here is Stein’s most important bit of data: “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58 percent more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” About that. There is another paper at NIH.gov that argues the study Stein cited above kind of maybe wrong. In a 2010 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science and titled “It is Developmental Me, Not Generation Me,” Brent W. Roberts, Grant Edmonds, and Emily Grijalva argue: “First, we show that when new data on narcissism are folded into preexisting meta-analytic data, there is no increase in narcissism in college students over the last few decades. Second, we show, in contrast, that age changes in narcissism are both replicable and comparatively large in comparison to generational changes in narcissism.” Basically, it’s not that people born after 1980 are narcissists, it’s that young people are narcissists, and they get over themselves as they get older. It’s like doing a study of toddlers and declaring those born since 2010 are “Generation Sociopath: Kids These Days Will Pull Your Hair, Pee On Walls, Throw Full Bowls of Cereal Without Even Thinking of the Consequences.” In addition, they further point out, “In turn, when older people are told that younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for generational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcissistic than they are. The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individuals will agree with the Generation Me argument despite its lack of empirical support.” Hahaha, you doddering old confused fools! Generation Abe Simpson!