All Things in Moderation

I’ve been looking around all afternoon for something to begin a new thread with and found this piece from Crooked Timber fairly interesting.  We keep hearing a lot about Baby Boomers and Gen X and Y or whatnot and so I thought this might be a conversation starter.  While I was reading the comments I came across one guy who was insistent that the boomers were the worst generation ever and a bunch of narcissistic destructive dolts or something along those lines.

One of the standard ploys in journalism, marketing and political commentary is the generation game. The basic idea is to label a generation ‘X’ or ‘Y’, then dissect its attitudes, culture, and relationship with other generations. The most famous generation, of course, is that of the Baby Boomers, born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, and their most enduring contribution to the generation gap is the ‘Generation Gap’ between children and their parents.

The generation game is played with particular vigour in cultural commentary, but its reach seems to be extending all the time. No US Presidential election would now be complete without voluminous commentary on the generational backgrounds of the contenders. There is even a branch of economics called generational accounting, which is supposed to show whether one generation is subsidising another through the tax and welfare system.

Once we strip out the more-or-less constant social distinctions associated with membership of a given age-group, the idea that we can say much about any particular cohort becomes far more dubious. In fact, cohort effects are only of much importance between the ages of 16 and about 25. The experience of childhood is dominated by family and school, and, while both families and schools have changed since the 1950s, the rate of change from one decade to the next has been quite slow.

On the other hand, by the time the members of a given cohort reach their late twenties, their live courses have diverged so much that they cease to form a well-defined group with common experiences. The differences between men and women, rich and poor, workers and bosses, married and single, parents and nonparents count for much more than the commonality that comes from sharing a date on a birth certificate.

For the crucial decade from 16 to 25, however, common experiences related to growing up at a particular time can be very important. Whether the labour market is in a boom or a slump when you finish school can make a big difference to your subsequent career. For males, an even more important question is whether the years of military age coincide with a major war. Peacetime and wartime generations, or boom and slump generations, can be very different.

This is a re-publication of a piece written prior to this recession but I thought this was interesting and I think we all know how both the 16-25 and the over 50 crowds are suffering this time.

It was not until the recession we had to have, from 1989 to 1992, and the waves of downsizing in the 1990s, that the end of postwar prosperity really hit the Vietnam generation and the baby bust cohort. Although the focus of policy attention remained firmly on youth unemployment, the real story of the 1990s was the disappearance of jobs for workers over 50, and particularly for men over 50. The employment rate for this group has fallen from nearly 100 per cent during the postwar boom to around 50 per cent today.

Filed under: 2012 | Tagged: Baby Boomers |