Baby boomers
Baby boomers, often shortened to boomers, are the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation and preceding Generation X. The generation is often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964 during the mid-20th century baby boom. The dates, the demographic context, and the cultural identifiers may vary by country.[1][2][3][4] Most baby boomers are the children of either the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation, and are often parents of Gen Xers and Millennials.[5]
"Boomer" and "Baby Boomer" redirect here. For the video game, see Baby Boomer (video game). For other uses, see Boomer (disambiguation).
In the West, boomers' childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s had significant reforms in education, both as part of the ideological confrontation that was the Cold War,[6][7] and as a continuation of the interwar period.[8][9] Theirs was a time of economic prosperity and rapid technological progress.[10] In the 1960s and 1970s, as this relatively large number of young people entered their teens and young adulthood—the oldest turned 18 in 1964—they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort,[11] and the social movements brought about by their size in numbers, such as the counterculture of the 1960s[12] and its backlash.[13]
In many countries, this period was one of deep political instability due to the postwar youth bulge.[13][14] In China, boomers lived through the Cultural Revolution and were subject to the one-child policy as adults.[15] These social changes and rhetoric had an important impact in the perceptions of the boomers, as well as society's increasingly common tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. This group reached puberty and maximum height earlier than previous generations.[16]
In Europe and North America, many boomers came of age in a time of increasing affluence and widespread government subsidies in postwar housing and education,[17] and grew up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.[18] Those with higher standards of living and educational levels were often the most demanding of betterment.[13][19] In the early 21st century, baby boomers in some developed countries are the single biggest cohort in their societies due to subreplacement fertility and population aging.[20] In the United States, they are the second most numerous age demographic after millennials.[21]
Etymology[edit]
The term baby boom refers to a noticeable increase in the birth rate. The post-World War II population increase was described as a "boom" by various newspaper reporters, including Sylvia F. Porter in a column in the May 4, 1951, edition of the New York Post, based on the increase of 2,357,000 in the population of the U.S. from 1940 to 1950.[22]
The first recorded use of "baby boomer" is in a January 1963 Daily Press article by Leslie J. Nason describing a massive surge of college enrollments approaching as the oldest boomers were coming of age.[23][24] The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern meaning of the term to a January 23, 1970, article in The Washington Post.[25]
In midlife[edit]
Economic power[edit]
By the early 2000s, the Baby Boomers reached middle age and were starting to save for retirement, though not necessarily enough. Seeking to increase their income and thus savings, many started investing, pushing interest rates to the floor. Borrowing became so cheap that some investors made rather risky decisions in order to get better returns. Financial analysts call this the "seeking yield" problem. But even the United States was not enough to absorb all these investments, so the capital flowed overseas, helping to fuel the considerable economic growth of various developing countries.[20] Steve Gillon has suggested that one thing that sets the Baby Boomers apart from other generational groups is the fact that "almost from the time they were conceived, boomers were dissected, analyzed, and pitched to by modern marketers, who reinforced a sense of generational distinctiveness".[147]
This is supported by the articles of the late 1940s identifying the increasing number of babies as an economic boom, such as a 1948 Newsweek article whose title proclaimed "Babies Mean Business",[148] or a 1948 Time magazine article called "Baby Boom".[149]
From 1979 to 2007, those receiving the highest one percentile of incomes saw their already large incomes increase by 278% while those in the middle at the 40th–60th percentiles saw a 35% increase. Since 1980, after the vast majority of Baby Boomer college goers graduated, the cost of college has been increased by over 600% (inflation-adjusted).[150]
After the CCP opened up their nation's economy in the late 1970s, because so many Baby Boomers did not have access to higher education, they were simply left behind as the Chinese economy grew enormously thanks to said reforms.[15]
In later years[edit]
Work and retirement[edit]
Baby boomers started entering retirement in the mid-2000s and have already begun withdrawing their investments. Any economic activities that depend on the cheap capital courtesy of the Baby Boomers will cease to be.[20] From a demographic point of view, the aging of the American workforce is inevitable due to the sheer number of the Baby Boomers.[157] Economists expected the United States to face a labor crunch in the 2010s as more and more Baby Boomers retired.[158] However, in 2018, a large portion of the older Baby Boomers (65–72 years of age) in the United States remained active in the labor force (29%), compared to the Silent Generation (21%) and the Greatest Generation (19%) when they were the same age, the Pew Research Center found by analyzing official labor statistics. The labor participation rate of women aged 65 to 72 in 2018 was 25% and of men of the same age group was 35%. This trend follows from the general expectation of Americans to work after the age of 65. The Baby Boomers who chose to remain in the work force after the age of 65 tended to be university graduates, whites, and residents of the big cities. That the Boomers maintained a relatively high labor participation rate made economic sense because the longer they postpone retirement, the more Social Security benefits they could claim, once they finally retire.[77] Large numbers prefer semi-retirement arrangements or flexible work schedules.[159] There is an ongoing shift away from pension plans in favor of 401(k) or similar options, which do not mandate retirement at a certain age.[160] Among the Boomers who have retired, a significant portion opts to live in the suburbs, where the Millennials are also moving to in large numbers as they have children of their own. These confluent trends increase the level of economic activities in the American suburbs.[161] Moreover, during the late 2010s, Millennials and seniors in the U.S. were driving up demand for affordable housing outside the major cities; to prevent another housing bubble, banks and regulators have restricted lending to filter out speculators and those with bad credit.[162]
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), elders in nations where people typically retire late like Sweden and Switzerland tended to experience memory loss at a rate twice as slow as their counterparts from countries where people usually retire early, such as France. Evidence suggests that those who remain mentally active are more likely to maintain their faculties.[163]
By the mid-2010s, it has already become apparent that China was facing a serious demographic crisis as the population of retirees boomed while the number of working-age people shrank. This poses serious challenges for any attempts to implement social support for the elderly and imposes constraints on China's future economic prospects.[155] In 2018, about 17.8% of China's population, or around 250 million people, was at least 60 years old. The Central Government has been considering raising the retirement age, like many other countries have done, though this is controversial among the Chinese public, who dislike postponing their pensions. As of 2020, China's retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women working for the government or in other white-collar jobs. But China's demography is such that the nation's pension funds will be "insolvent" by 2035 if current trends continue, according to an official report.[164]
In a 1985 study of U.S. generational cohorts by Schuman and Scott, a broad sample of adults was asked, "What world events over the past 50 years were especially important to them?"[194] For the baby boomers the results were:
Legacy[edit]
An indication of the importance put on the impact of this cohort was its selection by TIME magazine "Man of the Year" in 1966.[195] Due to their number, the Baby Boomers have been a dominant factor in American life since the time they were born.[97] While they were being born and growing up from the late 1940s and 1960s, American culture was centered around child-rearing. As young adults during the late 1960s and 1970s, the Boomers instigated a period of serious social and political turbulence.[97] Although the seeds of expressive individualism had already been sown by the Silent Generation, it was the Baby Boomers who pushed for the social and cultural changes that echoed down the decades, many of which taken for granted by subsequent cohorts.[97] As they built their careers during the 1980s and 1990s, they insisted on stability. As the youngest among them reached retirement in the early 2020s, they left behind a labor shortage.[97] In fact, retiring Baby Boomers were a contributing factor to the Great Resignation.[196] As Claire Raines points out in Beyond Generation X (1997), "never before in history had youth been so idealized as they were at this moment." According to her, when Generation X came along, it had much to live up to.[195][197]
The experimentation with marijuana and psychedelic drugs spearheaded by some of the baby boomers in their youth has continued to present day, leading in some countries to re-evaluation of these substances as useful medicinal and psychotherapeutic tools.[198][199]
Just as Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb (1968) was released, feminist movements were spreading all across the Western world. As access to education improved and contraception became readily available, women during the 1970s and 1980s became a lot more willing to delay or eschew marriage and to reduce the number of children, if any, they had. Because so many women during this period seized the opportunity to control their fertility, they have had a significant impact on the trajectory of human history.[200]
This intentional reduction of fertility occurred not just in Western countries, but also in places like India and Iran. Consequently, the predictions of Erlich failed to match reality. This development paved the way for the phenomenon of population aging observed in many countries around the world in the early twenty-first century.[200] Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan predicted that this demographic trend would result in "accelerating population falls unparalleled in speed and depth by any peacetime event in human history with the singular exception of the Black Plague." He noted, however, that baby boomers in Australia, New Zealand, Cyprus, Ireland, Iceland, and the United States had enough children so that their nations were not aging as rapidly as other developed and even some developing countries.[20]
According to the United Nations, between 2015 and 2040, East Asia would be the world's fastest aging region on Earth, with a forecasted increase in median age of 9.5 years. U.N. data also shows that the region has been aging faster than the global average since the mid-1970s. On one hand, this reflects dramatic improvements in standards of living compared to the 1960s; on the other hand, many East Asian polities, such as South Korea, are facing a demographic time bomb.[201]
