The most virulent commentary about Millenials came from a guy I used to work with. Now this guy defined grumpy, opinionated, and often factually wrong. He was either a very late GenX or a Millenial. It was his opinion that they just didn’t want to work or were lazy. Perhaps the specific people he was talking about were indeed lazy/didn’t want to work, but he generalized it to Millenials. My opinion is that people of every generation in their late teens early twenties, working in a low paid customer service job, don’t want to do that job, and don’t want to be there. Hell, I don’t want to be there.
That brings me to this: I’m a boomer, I went to college as an older non-traditional student. I didn’t finish. I think I was around 10 to 12 credits short. Along with all our family sort of dying around that time and my struggle with Algebra, I just couldn’t finish, and I was deep enough into student loans. So, I work at a gas station for as little as they can manage to pay and still get people to show up…occasionally.
Seriously, for a gas station they aren’t bad. But I’ve been there over 16 years and I don’t make 16 dollars an hour. Yet, we get a sad message on the fb page that we aren’t making enough money an hour, so we need to “step up”. We need to clean, clean, clean, stock, stock, stock, and for dog’s sake suggestive sell. It we don’t get our sales up well they just won’t be able to give us the hours we need.
No comment on the fact that there are seldom enough employees in the store to do all this plus man the registers at the same time. Oh, and we must buzz for help if we have more than one person in line. In other words, we’re being asked to do the border line impossible.
All this, to say I’m a Boomer and many/some people work the same sorts of jobs I do. I fail to see how I or any of my contemporaries working these jobs have benefited from our illustrious birth year. Yeah, the greedy corporations that do benefit may be owned by Baby Boomers, but who do we think is going to take those over when the Boomers in question?
That works if one is limiting the discussion to the specific phrase “baby boomer,” but it does not really hold water regarding the “baby boom.” I can remember my Mom talking at the end of the 1950s or early 1960s about a “baby boom,” pointing to the explosion of suburbs and larger schools occurring after WWII. She described it with the metaphor of a large snake with the population moving through its intestines, swelling its sides which would collapse when it has passed.
Labeling populations by age has always seemed silly, to me. I spent much of the 1970s and even 1980s being berated by members of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation (neither of which had actually acquired names at that point) for having Lost the Vietnam War because we “didn’t want to fight.” This despite the fact that over half the names on the Vietnam Memorial were of Boomers and right up until 1973, over half of Boomers polled on the topic supported the war.
Similarly, as already noted above, Boomers were not really in positions of power or authority until much of the damage and much of the good regarding ecology had already been laid out and acted upon or put into law.
Anecdotally, my boss in the 1970s (an early Boomer or late Silent) frequently complained how “kids today” don’t want to work–a sentiment echoed by my immediate supervisor a few years ago–making me laugh because he would have been one of the “kids” my earlier boss had complained about.
Today on all the various web sites inspired by Facebook, I frequently see articles whining that “Millennials” or “Gen-whatever” are responsible for this company or that industry or some other product have gone under because “they” have failed to support it. I’d be curious of the age of the people writing those articles (who are unlikely to be Boomers at this time) and laying blame on any age cohort. If any company shuts down, it is unlikely to be due to the lack of sales to a single group of any age.
Recently, the (long established) news has been making the rounds again, that Exxon scientists had identified global warming concerns in the 1960s, but their information had been suppressed by the company. At that time, the oldest Boomer would have been less than 30 years old and would certainly not have been anyone with the authority to crush that story.
Numbers vary by who is counting, but one estimate says that there were 76 million Boomers born, of whom 70 million, or so, are still around. That puts Millennials/Gen Y ahead, currently with 72 million.
However assigning 76 millions to a group born over the course of 19 years to a single “culture” is silly. I know that my values and concerns are fairly different from people born just a few years before me and different still from my brother who was born seven years after me–but we are all regarded as Boomers.
If the question is “Have Baby Boomers wrecked the planet?” The only accurate answer is that they have not had the power to do so, however they might have helped.
There are fads and movements that are associated with every group, but each group is too large and too differentiated to be able to take sole credit or blame for any actions. I get frustrated seeing or hearing that this or that subsequent generation has “caused” any terrible thing, but when I encounter a member of those generations saying the same thing about Boomers, I simply dismiss them as displaying ignorance.
When all of the men (and some women) went off to war, the construction of new homes slowed considerably. When they came back from war, this created a bit of a housing shortage, which was made even worse by the baby boom.
A lot of credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for what happened next goes to William Levitt. Levitt saw an opportunity for cheap, mass-production type homes in the suburbs.
The availability of cheap housing was a big part of the move to the suburbs, so in that sense the baby boom did cause the move. But the move to the suburbs was also spurred by racism and urban decay.
So yes, the baby boomers were “responsible” in part for the move to the suburbs, in the sense of the word “responsible” meaning cause and effect. But “responsible” has multiple meanings, and in the sense of being accountable or liable for what happened, I’m not seeing that. The boomers didn’t decide to be born.
And even if you use the cause and effect definition, you are ignoring the racism and urban decay aspects of it that were also part of the big move.
This post has much to recommend it. Generational constructs are often too weak to blame anyone for some complex problem - and has the potential further disadvantage of somewhat absolving groups who may have more agency regarding a specific issue. In some cases, blaming is also some combination of unhelpful, misattributed or oversimplified.
Epigenetics is too new for us to be confident we understand all its implications. Of course, I am unsure where it is in the moral spectrum if a cat attacks your feet as you sleep. However, people are not actually required to raise a fist instead of trying to lift all boats. The zeitgeist may currently emphasize confrontation, but the research suggests this has more psychological costs than one might suppose.
Well for what it’s worth, here is a graph of the USA birth rate over the years:
What I’m seeing is that from a historical high birth rates started declining in the early 20th century (condoms and diaphragms?) except for a hiccup right after World War One. Births bottom out during the Great Depression; then there’s a surge of (going off to war?) babies interrupted 1944-1946 while the most eligible bachelors are off to war. Then there’s a very sharp upturn peaking in 1948. Births stay high until about 1958 and then start declining again (the Pill?).
So in terms of a “boom” you might define that as the cohort born when the birthrate was at or above 24.0 per thousand, from about 1946 to 1961. If you accept a broader standard of birth rates at or above 20.5, then the boom associated with WW2 and postwar extended from about 1942 to 1965, or very broadly the period at or above 19.0 from 1940 to 1966, after which birth rates declined to Depression or lower numbers.
I don’t remember precisely when I heard the term, “Baby Boom,” the first time. I do remember my mom telling me that when she went to deliver my sister, 1952, that there were women lined up in the hallways of the hospital on gurneys. I think that conversation may well have been started by discussion of the Baby Boom. I believe the first time we talked about it had to have been in the mid 60’s.
Where they hadn’t named the generation yet, it seems like it was sort of inevitable since they had named the phenomenon.
Boomers are the ones who wanted everybody to be lumped into generational categories because (I can only guess) at that time it supported their self-flattering tendencies. They labeled “Generation X” as “X” because it didn’t fit into a neat box (imagine that!) and were uninterested in self-labeing. Labeled “Millennials” as “Millennials” again for the same reason, and I guess because 2000 is a nice round number for people born in 1981. Again, Boomers literally wrote that book.
Boomers were broadly happy to accept generational essentialism as long as it was flattering to themselves, and now it’s picked up negative connotations, so they want to reject it.
Again, like I’ll tell anyone else, I am less interested in blaming Boomers for wrecking the planet, than for pointing out reasons they should stop acting like they saved the planet.
Exactly. Saying that “boomers” are engaging in generational essentialism is generational essentialism. Even if there are a few percentage points of differences between the generations in their tendencies, it is not sufficient for me to give up my liberal ideals of treating everyone as an individual, no matter their supposed generational cohort, (or race or gender, for that matter), since those are all artificial constructs.
What percentage of boomers wanted this? Can you break it down by socioeconomic class? By race? Is this something that boomers who were born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in the 1970s wanted? What about Oglala Sioux boomers–were they super into this idea? I’m wondering about the boomers who worked on the GM production lines in the 1980s, but also wondering about boomers who sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter to help end segregation, and how concerned they were with generational identity.
You can “not all boomers” to your heart’s content, but it doesn’t change the fact that the labeling you hate came from your own group, for your own group.
And here’s that relentless irresistible tendency to take credit for all the world-changing stuff in the 60’s when it’s rhetorically advantageous, which is the root of all the labeling. If your generation is responsible for the Civil Rights Movement and Roe v. Wade, then you’re also responsible for Reagan and Trump and the end of Roe v. Wade. There’s no having it both ways.
And if you really look into that, a lot of the leaders, the movers and shakers, were older. Because leaders usually are. Dr. Martin Luther King was born in 1929, for instance.
I think generational essentialism is silly. I think it makes nice fluffy articles in Life magazine, or Wired. But it gets the fundamental mechanism wrong. Ideals change over time. They don’t change all at once, but they come into prominence from time to time. And when they do, there are usually a few older people driving the bus, but the bulk of the passengers are young adults. Because young adults are more flexible than older people. So there’s this impression that “young people these days…” But it’s not a majority of the young people, not usually. And the change comes slowly. It’s just that older people, and people writing puff journalism pieces look at all those young people on the bus and say, “young people these days.”
But we have recordings of people saying “young people these days” from as far back as we have recordings of people commenting on social issues at all.
As for “naming generations”? The baby boom was discussed when the first boomers were small children. It was inevitable they would be labeled as such. Go back and look at that Google ngram. “Baby boomer” wasn’t a popular phrase in the 30s, but Google claims it was being used. Those were some big demographic swings, and of course people talked about it.
I’m an older Millennial (1983) so damn near gen X and it blows my mind that you can make a generalization about a generation that spanned the rise of the Internet. I did not have Internet until I was maybe 16. I got my first cell phone at 18 - A BlackBerry. Smart phones weren’t really a thing until I was well into college. To lump me in with someone who has never known a world without the Internet - not to mention not old enough to remember 9-11 - is bonkers to me.
Nature defines our species, and generally how our specie’s behavior varies from that of other species.
Nurture defines, shapes and differentiates the behavior of individuals within a species, not within a pack, a clowder, a herd, a troop…and not within a generation. It’s as simple as that, unless you take a racist view, and believe there is significant variation of human behavior based on race or some other genetic factor.
Generations cannot be a [nature] factor because tens or hundreds of years is not enough time for evolution to affect behavior.
Do you think Nazi Germans were genetically different from other humans, accounting for their acceptance of human extermination as a solution? Do you think you would be different if you were born into a pro-Nazi household at that time? Maybe you would be different (not all Germans accepted it, and many may have unwillingly accepted it out of legitimate fear), but maybe you wouldn’t be any different from the status quo. You can’t really base how you think you’d act being born into a regressive household looking through your enlightened, rose-colored glasses. You would not have those glasses to wear in pre-WWII Germany.
Greatest Generation v. Silent Generation v. Boomer Generation v. Generation X v. Generation Y v. Generation Z v. Generation Alpha is no different. Same nature, different nurture.
On the other hand, Generation Z sucks. I think they’re a different species from the rest of us.
The one thing that I think truly made the post war boom generation both unique and uniquely influential has only been indirectly mentioned. After WWII ended, the U.S. economy went through a historic, and unsustainable, boom period that drove it to the top of the economic, political, military, and cultural world order. This was only possible because the U.S. was the only large industrial economy that was completely undamaged by the worst war in modern history. In fact, the economy boomed because of the U.S. supplying arms for the war. And afterwards, the U.S. industry could barely keep up with foreign demand. Lend-lease and the Marshall plan benefited the Allies, post war Western Europe, and Japan, but were also hugely profitable for U.S. businesses as well.
Never before, and possibly never again, could a large percent of working class parents expect to be able to send their kids to college and see them move up the economic ladder.
But that boom could not last. Once other countries rebuilt their industry, they didn’t need to keep importing from U.S. But in a capitalist economy, you can’t just downsize and move on. First came the switch to consumer goods, then services, then just plain moving money around to make more money. As you move down that track, the GDP keeps going up, but fewer and fewer benefit.
Very few Boomers are outright villains (or heros), just like every other generation. Personalizing it is pointless. But deep down, (almost)everyone thinks they are normal. Boomers grew up in an era of continuous growth and the idea that most kids would have better opportunities than their parents. But when the 70s and 80s hit, that all started to change. Unions were gutted, the social safety net was cut back. College tuition started increasing faster than inflation at the same time government support of colleges started shifting from grants to loans. Starting in the 90s housing prices starting going up much faster than wages. First single wage households owning homes and putting kids through college became a luxury, now even dual income families often have can’t own a home, save for retirement and afford college.
IMHO a lot of our economic angst today is a result of the assumption of continuous growth, which only seemed valid due to a unique economic condition that will probably (and hopefully) never occur again.
The resentment comes from people trying to build a life raft out of driftwood being lectured by the people who already bought up all the boats about being to lazy to save themselves from drowning.
As I posted up-thread, individuals are responsible and accountable for their actions, good, or bad. Individuals have agency. Individuals are influenced by their nurture (the environment they were raised in), but they can raise above, or below, or stay the same as their environmental influences. Sometimes it’s very difficult to behave counter to your environment, but it’s not impossible. There are many special people throughout history who have risen above their environmental influence and done great good (and sometimes paid with their life). And there are others who have sunk below their environmental influences and done great bad (and sometimes ruined the lives of others). But given any well-sampled groups of people (e.g. generations), the proportion of people who do good or evil will be about the same.
My only point is that this is an individual choice, not a generational choice. One generation is no different than any other generation, except for being born into different times. They will behave the same, statistically, only dependent on their core specie’s behavior (nature), which you can’t change, and the environment you grew up in, which you have some agency in bucking, but not a lot.
Two guys wrote a book. They were born in 1947 and 1951. Ergo, boomers. Ergo, we’re stuck with it.
It’s not “Not all boomers.” It’s “Boomer means nothing.” My kids see the world differntly that I do. I see the world differently than my parents do. So, I can see some appeal for generational groupings. However, someone born the same year as me on a farm in Iowa is a fellow boomer, but we might have very little in common. Same for a thousand other variables. Those who think the generational label has any significant meaning have failed to convince me.
