Baby boomers

"Boomer" and "Baby Boomer" redirect here. For the video game, see Baby Boomer (video game). For other uses, see Boomer (disambiguation).

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Social generations of the Western world

Baby boomers, often shortened to boomers, are the demographic cohort preceded by the Silent Generation and followed by 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 Millennials.[5] 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 sub-replacement fertility and population aging.[20] In the United States, they are the second most numerous age demographic after millennials.[21]

  1. ^ Owram, Doug (December 31, 1997). Born at the Right Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. doi:10.3138/9781442657106. ISBN 978-1-4426-5710-6.
  2. ^ Little, Bruce; Foot, David K.; Stoffman, Daniel (1998). "Boom, Bust & Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift". Foreign Policy (113): 110. doi:10.2307/1149238. ISSN 0015-7228. JSTOR 1149238.
  3. ^ Salt, Bernard (2004). The Big Shift. South Yarra, Victoria: Hardie Grant Books. ISBN 978-1-74066-188-1.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Delaunay-2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Rebecca Leung (September 4, 2005). "The Echo Boomers – 60 Minutes". CBS News. Archived from the original on November 4, 2013. Retrieved August 24, 2010.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Stroke-2013 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Knudson-201d was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Garraty-1991 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Gispert was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Twenge-2023a was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Pinker, Steven (2011). The Better Angels Of Our Nature. Penguin. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-141-03464-5.
  12. ^ Owram, Doug (1997). Born at the Right Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. xi. ISBN 978-0-8020-8086-8.
  13. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Suri-2009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Turchin-2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Woodruff, Judy; French, Howard (August 1, 2016). "The unprecedented aging crisis that's about to hit China". PBS Newshour. Archived from the original on September 26, 2020. Retrieved August 13, 2020.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hobsbawn-1996b was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Owram, Doug (1997). Born at the Right Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. x. ISBN 978-0-8020-8086-8.
  18. ^ Jones, Landon (1980). Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hobsbawn-1996 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ Zeihan, Peter (2016). "Chapter 5: The End of the (Old) World". The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World without America. Austin, TX: Zeihan on Geopolitics. ISBN 978-0-9985052-0-6. Population pyramids of the developed world without the U.S. Archived October 30, 2020, at the Wayback Machine and of the U.S. in 2030 Archived October 10, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.
  21. ^ Fry, Richard (April 28, 2022). "Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America's largest generation". Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on April 28, 2020. Retrieved May 31, 2022.