Boomers

I love a good map or graph. They are the proverbial pictures that are worth a thousand words. Or more.

This one tells the story of the Baby Boomers. See that large red wave at the center? That’s me and my cohort of Boomers. It was caused in equal parts by the Depression and World War II. Both of which caused folks to put off having children. When the war was over and prosperity returned to the US, our parents made up for lost time. In a BIG way – the greatest explosion of births that the US had ever seen or is likely to see again. 

The wave crested in 1957-8 and tapered off, as the baby makers had pretty much spent themselves. This birth tsunami has rolled on ever since, changing economics and societal pressures in many ways. It is this Boomer wave which is about to push Social Security into a rocky cliff, unless Congress acts. Our wave will roll on the ocean for another 25 years or so, until it , like all waves, dissipates into the beachy sands of time.
Yet the Boomers have left their own legacy. Our children have formed their own second wave – broader and not as pronounced - “Generation Y”.

In college, my first use of the monster IBM 360/90 mainframe computer was in a class on demographics. We used the computer to model various possibilities for the Boomers – increased life expectancy, decreased children per couple, etc. One thing was clear from all the various combinations and permutations: the Boomer cohort was and is a birth phenomenon that is unlikely to be repeated. Boomers will always be unique in that way. Maybe a few other ways, too.