[shimon]

An exercise from the essay:

...And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "the greatest generation." [2]

Footnote:

[2] Oops, offended another constituency. Exercise for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same people the first version would offend.

Please submit your solutions below.

[rms]

And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; all generations have the potential to be as great as the (Greatest Generation, GI Generation) when faced with sufficient external challenges.

[cperciva]

'... I'm skeptical about the idea that the current generation is in any way inferior to past generations.'

[rms]

A first step to this exercise is the expand the statement to make sure that your rephrasing is expressing all the original ideas.

Idea #1: skepticism about the idea that one generation is inherently better or worse than another generation, specifically with regards to the WW2 generation

Idea #2: People have a tendency to rise to meet external challenges as it becomes necessary. So if Generation Y had a challenge as great as WW2, we would rise to meet it, and if the present day union leaders had a challenge as great as the historical labor movement, they would rise to meet it.

What else?

[sachinag]

I'm skeptical that some groups of people are inherently braver, smarter, or harder working than others.

[ewjordan]

Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities.

Your proposed version is quite PC, to be sure, and I'm sure most humanities majors would defend it tooth and nail (cheap dig, I know :) ), but that in itself suggests to me that it's not what pg had in mind...

For one, I'd expect a lot of people here, including pg, to believe that startup founders excel in all of those categories, even if it's simply selection bias that causes it.

[sachinag]

Actually, that's what makes it better. The argument against Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation isn't that those WWII heroes were so special; it's that no one generation could be.

I could have been more precise with a modifying phrase such as "by accident of birth", but that was too unwieldy. The upvoted comments are specific to the GG argument, which are suboptimal, because they don't work as good writing unless you've seen PG's original.

(Yeah, I'm a part-time writer/editor to pay the beer bills, and I can get defensive about my writing. Sue me. You're better at design/coding/picking up chicks than I.)

[rms]

Yours may be "good writing" but you completely changed the meaning of the statement. In my opinion, it's important to mention WW2 -- it's easy to make the statement not offensive to The Greatest Generation by completely removing the reference.