The term baby boomer first described a coming college crush
The phrase baby boomer first appeared in a January 1963 newspaper article warning that a flood of students was about to hit American colleges. The cohort it described, usually dated to births from 1946 to 1964, was so large it helped invent the very habit of thinking about society in generations.
Newspaper writers were already calling the postwar surge a boom by 1951, when columnist Sylvia Porter noted that the US population had grown by 19,161,229, or 14.5%, between the 1940 and 1950 censuses. The 1946 to 1964 range is used by bodies from Pew Research to the US Census Bureau, though definitions differ by country. One Canadian writer counts the years from 1947 to 1966 when more than 400,000 babies were born annually; a French author stretches France's boom to 1973.
Boomers grew up amid prosperity and fast technological change, and many expected the world to keep getting better. As teenagers their sheer numbers fuelled social movements and, in many countries, political turbulence. In the US the older half, born 1946 to 1955 and numbering roughly 38 million, came of age during Vietnam and the civil rights era; about one in ten boomer men served in the military. The younger half, sometimes called Generation Jones, reached adulthood amid Watergate and the energy-driven slump of the 1970s. China's boomers, the largest such cohort anywhere, lived through the Cultural Revolution and then the one-child policy.
Their ageing now reshapes whole societies. Because later generations had fewer children, boomers are the largest cohort in some developed countries. In the European Union, the average woman had 2.6 children in 1960 but 1.5 by 2015, and the median age climbed from about 29 in the 1950s to 43 in 2019. Japan, whose population peaked in 2017, already had 27% of its people over 65 by 2018.
East Asia is ageing fastest of all. Moving from an aged society to a super-aged one, where 21% are over 65, is projected to take Singapore seven years and South Korea eight, against 29 for France and 51 for the United Kingdom.
Source: Baby boomers
