I've been saying for decades that my end of the baby boom has little in common with the "baby boomers" we constantly hear about--including the most recent two presidents. The WSJ's Jeff Zaslow has a great report:
There's a great distance between Barry Manilow and Barry Bonds.
Mr. Manilow, the singer, was born in 1946, the first year of the postwar
baby boom. About 76 million births later, Mr. Bonds, the baseball slugger,
became one of America's last boomers. That was in 1964, when demographers
say the boom ended.
Typically, those born within that period are lumped together as the
"baby boom generation," as if their values, habits and product preferences
are unified. In fact, as the "late-wave boomers" turn 40 this year, it's
clear that the classes of 1946 and 1964 are often very different, at times
resulting in alienation and even finger-pointing. It's a much-overlooked
development that marketers, the media and policy-makers ignore at their
peril.
John Dieffenbach, a 40-year-old attorney in Pleasantville, N.Y., says
many of the oldest boomers are "a self-aggrandizing" bunch who treat him
like an auxiliary member of their generation. "I'm part of their club, but
don't get the benefits." He doesn't get the "benefit" of nostalgia -- being
able to say he recalls when Kennedy was shot, or the Beatles arrived in
America. And people his age might not receive full Social Security benefits
when they retire, because the oldest boomers may strain the system.
The oldest boomers came of age at a time of affordable housing, easier
acceptance to colleges and better job markets. The youngest boomers
struggled through deeper recessions, crowded workplaces, and now,
outsourced jobs. Younger boomers also worry that in the next decade or so,
their 401(k) values will fall as retired older boomers cash out of
stocks.
"I share very little culturally with a 58-year-old," Mr. Dieffenbach
says. In 1986, when the media declared "Boomer Generation Turns 40," he was
just 22. In 1996, when newspaper articles celebrated "Boomers Turn 50" --
counting the candles on their cakes (400,000 a day) and the cash spent on
their birthday presents ($1 billion that year) -- Mr. Dieffenbach was just
32. "I'm waiting for the 'Baby Boomers are Dead' stories," he says, only
half-jokingly.
My GenX youngest brother (born 1970) thinks of boomers as spoiled yuppies--the people he watched on Thirtysomething when I was only twentysomething--and doesn't associate them at all with the 1960s.
Click through to the Zaslow story. The chart alone is worth the visit. |
