Lots of schools, shopping centers, etc. As those boomers grew older and their children started families, even more housing boom. As those boomers grew even older, but less children were being born after the mid-60’s, schools starting closing, but more retirement communities were built. Fast forward another 15-20 years, and you have a boom in nursing homes.
I had an economics teacher who described this as being like a snake that just swallowed a whole elephant. You can see the elephant moving down the length of the (inside of) the snake, a big bulge in the snake moving from the snake’s head toward the tail.
The term “lost generation” was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who took it from Gertrude Stein, who heard it from a French garage owner, who was just using it to berate someone. Then it was used for a particular group of American writers living in Paris after World War I. Then it got applied to everyone born between 1883 and 1900. The implication was that coming of age during the war affected them. This all strikes me as being pretty arbitrary.
Kids born in 1965 didn’t enjoy the post-war economic boom. They enjoyed rising unemployment (all the jobs soaked up by the cumulative excess births), and when they did get jobs, no promotion (all the senior jobs soaked up by the preceding boom). People born 55-65 don’t get a generation name only because, being relatively poor compared to the older boomers, they aren’t of much interest as a market segment.
The analogy to astrology is apt. The idea of dividing people up by their birth years is fundamentally questionable. It basically is a kind of astrology.
