Baby Boomers officially were born between through Sometimes, this range is through In all cases, it was the generation that was born just following the return of the military from World War II. By the end of , there were 2. That was just that initial year. In , that number swelled to And, by , their highest population present in the United States was This also includes those who immigrated to the country and were born in those years. As noted, the Silent Generation came directly prior to the Baby Boomer generation.
This generation, which spanned from through was an era in which these individuals were considered more cautious than their parents were. This generation was responsible, though, for shaping the 20th century pop culture and they brought with them television legends, filmmakers, gonzo journalists and political satirists. Interestingly, there are no presidents born in this generation.
Generation X came after the Baby Boomer generation. These individuals were born between and sometimes this is from through No members of this generation served as president. However, this generation is known to have done well. The group collectively learned more than Baby Boomers did when they were the same age.
However, only 36 percent of them have more wealth than their parents. By , Generation X will outnumber Baby Boomers. As of , there were between After 16 long years of depression and war, Americans longed for a time of normalcy. This is what led to the incredible numbers of births in the years following the wars. And, older Americans who had previously put off getting married and having children during the rough years of the Great Depression followed by the war were not able to do so.
One thing that makes this group so interesting is their confidence in the future. After such long battles, this group is known for its positive, confident attitude that the future looked comfortable and prosperous. And, they were accurate for many reasons. During their lifetimes, they watched businesses grow and become profitable.
They watched labor unions to help to improve working conditions for people. And, they saw wages rise. They also saw schools become more accessible. And, perhaps one of the biggest changes to hit Americans happened during their lifetime. People moved to the suburbs. Baby Boomers were able to build their own homes using developers who were now using faster methods to building homes. It was more affordable to buy a home, build a home, and access the funds to do so through the GI Bill.
Their homes changed, too. Baby Boomers were a hard-working generation. And, they value that hard work. The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from January 24 through February 19, among a randomly selected nationally representative sample of 2, adults. Baby boomers are defined as adults ages at the time the survey was taken. On a question that asked respondents to rate their present life on a scale of zero to 10, boomers, on average, give their lives a rating of 6. In contrast, adults older than boomers those who are ages 63 and above give their lives an average rating of 6.
Adults younger than boomers those who are ages 18 to 41 give their lives an average rating of 6. A pattern of gaps, however, has lasted throughout the two decades the Pew Research Center has been asking this question, although in some years the differences are too small to be statistically significant. Since — back when boomers ranged in age from 25 through 43 — their self-rankings have trailed those of adults who are older than them. As for adults who are younger than boomers, the pattern is more mixed.
For the past four years, boomers have also trailed this younger group. But in the late s through , boomers gave their lives a slightly better rating than younger adults gave theirs. A table at the end of this analysis shows the trend in quality of life ratings for each of these age groups since Worried About Money. That majority makes them the exception among all adults. The anomaly here is that boomers are in their peak earning years. In the Pew survey, boomers also are more likely than younger or older adults to own stocks or bonds, and to have retirement accounts.
Even so, boomers are more anxious than other Americans that they will have to cut household spending in the coming year because money is tight. By other measures, boomers are less fiscally strained than younger adults.
Asked to compare their standard of living with that of their parents at the same age, boomers are more downbeat than younger or older adults. Peering into the future, most baby boomers do not believe their own children will have a higher standard of living than they do. They are more likely than younger or older Americans to believe that it is harder to make progress, and easier to lose ground, than it was in the past.
Two-thirds of baby boomers say it is harder for people to get ahead now than a decade ago. That is a more downbeat assessment than other age groups give. Well, most of our problems have not been addressed because that would require higher taxes and therefore a sense of social obligation to our fellow citizens.
But again, the boomers seem to have no appreciation for social solidarity. But to answer your question more directly, the problem is that dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the largest political class in the country — the boomers. And it just so happens that the boomers are not socially inclined and have a ton of maladaptive personality characteristics. And this is when we get this wave of neoliberalism that essentially guts the public sector and attempts to privatize everything.
What made them this way? I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won't be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it. This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.
They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind? This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts. The irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for being too driven by feelings.
But the boomers are the first big feelings generation. And you can see this in their policies. Take this whole fantasy about trickle-down economics. The evidence is overwhelming. The experiment is over. I'll give you something abstract and something concrete. On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward.
In an impossible place. We'll have fewer and fewer resources to deal with these issues. And I actually think that over the next years, absent some major technological innovation like de-carbonization, which is speculative at this point, these actions will actually just kill people.
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