Generational Amnesia

CORE DEFINITION

Generational amnesia, also called the shifting baseline syndrome, describes how each generation adopts the conditions of its youth as the reference point for what counts as normal. Because the baseline moves with each cohort, slow deterioration across decades is never registered as a loss by anyone alive to observe it. The concept was introduced in fisheries research by Daniel Pauly and extends to environmental quality, product standards, and organizational culture. Key qualification: the effect concerns perception rather than measurement, so it is countered by recorded baselines.