generational brokering

Via Kottke, we are referred to this data visualisation of the past century of American generations represented as stacked, staggered bar chart which while reinforcing the reality that all ages come into being and pass and no one’s scheme for immortality has yet worked out and we’re not the first to think ourselves on the cusp of change or bemoaned our own cohort, or those past and future cadres and the factors that limn them. Questions of intergenerational equity aside and the real and perceived firewall that tips the scale in favour of lingering demographics—important as those questions maybe—these stair-step histograms also reveal, with a certain kind of elegant immediacy (see also) is the progress made in terms of life expectancy and quality of life. More at the links above.