Guest Post by Ed Stephan.
Nearly all news media now tend to “tabloidize” events — not just pointing with alarm to unusual events, but also seeing everything only from the point of view of how events affect an individual. A story about unemployment may begin with “Mary looks fretfully at what may be her last paycheck.” NPR and its imitators add sound effects to provide still more “realism”. Rarely do you get a sense of the “big picture” in the form of analytical information. I want to take a moment to suggest a more useful point of view, one born out of my own field of Demography.
The most fundamental fact any society has to deal with is absorbing its annual births — dealing with those births as they age through the life cycle. Here is a simple chart showing the number of births in the United States, every year from 1910 to 2000:
The two most obvious facts about this curve are the Great birth Depression during the 1930s and the subsequent (supposedly well-known) “Baby Boom”. There are many less obvious facts, too; most of them we only have space to note: the tiny baby boom after WWI (1920-1), the fact the real decline in births took place all during the pre-Depression, prosperous “flapper era” of the 1920s, the brief drop in birth toward the end of WWII (1944-5) when the bulk of the troops actually went overseas, the rapid decline in births (“baby bust”) following introduction of “the pill” in 1960, the “echo effect” of the original boom (or “baby boomlet”) beginning in 1975.
Good Times. Each of these ups and downs have real consequences for the nation, often decades later. First, of course, is the impact on schools. Depression era babies are referred to by Demographers as the “Good Times” cohort. Odd choice till you realize that every year of decline in births meant that each group was less numerous as they went through school. Compared to their older siblings they had relatively more access to their teachers and the playground and sports and the band. On that basis it is not surprising that they arrived at college, 20 years later, as the politically conservative “silent generation”. They were scare, and therefore valued, in school and when they arrived on the job market. Corporations began campus recruiting to snap up this generation. They became the “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit”. Their arrival in the housing market around age 30 coincided with the growth of homogenized suburbia, and they filled those larger homes with that most conspicuous display of consumptions, the….
Baby Boom. Right after WWII Demographers expected an uptick in births, just as after WWI, followed by a return to the long-term decline characterising industrial nations for well over a century. By 1948 most realized that the decline wasn’t going to happen. They identified this anomoly as the “post war baby boom”. If you look back at the chart, however, you’ll see that the real boom began before the war, around 1940, as preparation for war took us out of the Depression, and it went on until 1960. I don’t know why journalists continue to refer to the “boom” of 1946-1964; I guess they get the 46 part from “post war” and the 64 part by a sort of dyslexic termination. Pundits still say the Baby Boom will begin retiring just after 2010, even though the number of 65-year-olds is increasing right now.
’60s Radicalism. In any case, the Baby Boom couldn’t be demographically more different than their parents: they got split-shift schools, restrictive college entrance exams and enormous intro sections taught by TAs. Their arrival on the job market produced the “bluing of America”, the country’s first generational downshift from white-collar to blue-collar work. Had there never been a Vietnam, this cohort would have been radical (in the Chemistry sense: unattached and unstable, “free”). In fact, the beginnings of radicalism in the ’60s, long precede Vietnam. The Berkeley student riots against San Francisco’s HUAC hearings were in May, 1960. The Freedom Ride left DC in May, 1961. Vietnam didn’t really begin until the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August, 1964. When the 30-year-old Baby Boom entered the housing market in the 1970s, housing prices shot up dramatically, in most cases now well beyond the reach of a single income earner. There could not have been a greater cultural gap between beliefs and values of Boomers and their parental Good Timers.
Crime Rates. The Reagan administration loved to boast of its putting the brakes on the rising crime rates of earlier years. Most crimes are committed by people in their late teens and very early twenties. No need to moralize about permissive child-rearing or Freud: simply let the Baby Boom hit this age range, during 1960-80, and the crime rate will rise. It’s simply an increase in the mix of 20-year-olds in the general population. Without any “crackdowns” at all the crime rate would have leveled off and even declined, as it did during the 1980s and ’90s. The “crackdown” policy didn’t affect the crime rate. it just added lengthy, mandatory jail terms to swell the prison population beyond the rate of any other nation. By far.
What now? Can we go beyond looking at the distant past?
The college-age hearts of the “baby bust” of the 1960s and ’70s leaned toward Reagan and a centrist, Clinton. The “baby boomlet” which is now entering college spearheaded Dean’s push for the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”. But neither cohort can be as strongly stereotyped as their predecessors, for several reasons. The numbers swings are not so great for one thing. Maybe more importantly, these cohorts have predecessor cohorts to learn about from books and movies, to pick and choose as models.
One thing inescapably facing all birth cohorts is the coming burden upon those in working ages. Regardless of costs and politics, the sheer numbers of those aged 65 and older, per 100 people aged 20-64, will nearly double by 2040. That “boom” – most with its increasing need for health care – begins in 2010, just two years into the next Presidency. Any current or future candiate with a substantial background in nationwide health-care policy and proposals, hmmm?
