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Generic generalizations such as “ravens are black” or “tigers have stripes” have seen an upsurge of interest, due in significant part to the fact that they are also the language of stereotypes (“Germans lack a sense of humor”). This interest is presumably motivated by the thought that generics guide actions. In this talk, I investigate this link more closely. The basic problem is that generics display incidence variability: the truth of a given generic is compatible with an incredibly wide range of frequencies with which the predicated property is present among members of the kind. Yet the most widely accepted model of rational action that takes risk into account is expected utility theory where such frequency information is crucial. I’ll look at various solutions and present my own, according to which the truth of a generic proposition is only distally related to any particular instance of action guidance.