Are We Living In A Time Of Particularly Rapid Social Change? And How Might We Know?

In an editorial for this journal a decade ago, then-Editor-in-Chief Fred Phillips asserted that social change was proceeding at hyper-speed and, moreover, that it had consequently come to outpace technological change. This paper submits these claims to empirical assay. In so doing, we address the myriad problems attendant upon determining and interpreting the sort of data that might support us in our cause. Notwithstanding the innumerable caveats that this necessarily entails, and restricting ourselves to considering US data, we conclude that a wide range of indicators suggest that millennial Americans are not living in a time of particularly rapid social change, at least not when compared to the period 1900-1950. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the data that we have considered does not easily support a contention that significant variation in social change occurs in long wave-like cycles. The evidence is more supportive of a punctuated equilibrium model of change.