Neil Howe is many things: The author of several books, a Washington D.C.-area consultant, and an asset management executive at Hedgeye Risk Management.
He’s also the man who coined the term “millennial” back in 1991 as part of his wholesale invention of a new field: generational research. His book The Fourth Turning, coauthored in 1997 with William Strauss, provocatively argued that each generation has a specific role to play in the “secular cycles” of history—and predicted that a crisis era would engulf the United States from roughly 2005 to 2020. Derided as “pseudoscience” by the same media that happily appropriated his term for the emerging millennial generation, this modern-day Nostradamus has gained increasing caché, if not quite full adherence.
