Baby boomer

A baby boomer is someone born in a period of increased birth rates, such as those during the economic prosperity that in many countries followed World War II. In the United States, demographers have put the generation's birth years at 1946 to 1964, despite the fact that the U.S. birth rate actually began to decline after 1957. William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations include those conceived by soldiers on leave during the war, putting the generation's birth years at 1943 to 1960. Howe and Strauss argue that persons born between 1961 and 1964 have political and cultural patterns very different from those born between 1955 and 1960 and fit into what those writers term the Thirteenth Generation or Generation X (also known as the Cold War generation) born between 1961 and 1981. As the influence of Strauss and Howe has grown, few people still accept Baby Boomers as including those born after 1961, although there are some who put the dates at 1946 to 1963 because of the number of significant "Gen-X" figures born in 1964, including Courtney Love and Eddie Vedder.

Place in time

Boomers' typical grandparents were of the Lost Generation; their parents were of the G.I. Generation and Silent Generation. Their children are of Generation X and the Millennial Generation and their typical grandchildren will be of the Generation Z (born roughly about 2000 - 2021).

Related Topics:
Lost Generation - G.I. Generation - Silent Generation - Generation X - Millennial Generation

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Unlike the previous generation (the Silent), Boomers lack any childhood recollection of World War II. Unlike the next generation (Generation X), many American Boomers fought in Vietnam or organized opposition to it, or were reaching adolescence or lingering in "post-adolescence" (a term coined for them) as the Vietnam War drew to a close. See also Generation gap.

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Born early or late within their generation, Boomers could hardly avoid a world of Beatlemania, mod clothes, a search of either new philosophical discoveries in India or hallucinogenic drugs in Mexico. A great gap emerged in America between those organizing against the Vietnam War and those fighting and dying in the same war, Although the term "Boomer" is now in global use, the generation is also known in Europe as the Generation of 1968 for protests that led to the fall of the French government and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Cheap, easy travel, relative peace, inexpensive and widespread college education, and mass communications that others had created had made the philosophical and cultural awakening possible for many.

Related Topics:
Beatlemania - Prague Spring

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In the Communist bloc, the Baby Boomers-- born during and after the Great Patriotic War-- were known to view the Khrushchev years with fondness, as an era of floating idealism, growing living standards and a booming economy. Eventually, they became cynical, bitter, and hostile to the more conservative Brezhnev-Kosygin era, where corruption was rife, the economy became stagnant, Communist idealism evaporated. The fact they they were also the first generation without mature memories of war or Stalinism separated them from their more ideologically-inclined parents and made them prone to questioning the establishment, often risking imprisonment.

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What Howe and Strauss termed the Consciousness Awakening of the 1960s faded, and the popular culture became less euphoric. Drugs and political radicalism began to charge persons less naïve about self-interest than the hippies who flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and pathologies became more commonplace. By the 1970s a revival of religious activity led to a resurgence of religious fundamentalism that has reshaped American life. By 1980, reactionary trends had become surprisingly common in Boomers, and Ronald Reagan, a politician who had based much of his political career on opposition to the cultural tendencies of Boomers of the late-1960's, was able to win a majority of Boomers as voters.

Related Topics:
Consciousness Awakening - Haight-Ashbury - Religious fundamentalism - Ronald Reagan

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Like other Idealist generations, Boomers got an early start in elective politics. By 1988 the elder George Bush selected the fortyish Dan Quayle as Vice-President; by 1992, American voters voted Bill Clinton in as President of the United States; the Presidential succession had gone from a veteran of World War II to a draft resister of the Vietnam War, bypassing the Silent Generation altogether. By 2001, George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton as President.

Related Topics:
Dan Quayle - Bill Clinton - Silent Generation - George W. Bush

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For their numbers and their resources, Boomers have had but slight achievements in technology and in any commerce not related to culture. However, they have had crucial roles in developing the American technology and finance industries which dominate to a good deal the US economy today, and popularizing and shepherding the growth of consumer goods and marketing development and sale.

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