Excuse me, I'm "classified" again as a what?

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The idea of gen x,yz etc is made up marketing drek. You can mute the market droid who thought this typecasting up heeh it;s so silly. for example some are a mix of their 2 types. And humans are not only a product of one time frame so silly. Ok iam done with my rant. heeh

Well, hypothetically, charts like these are a vehicle to get people talking about the things that are important to them in the workplace - and those, quite often, do seem to change with age. So....

Er. I was born in 1982. What does that make me, a hybrid??

Apple

Actually generation X is the lost generation, and its really part of the boomers. Its the tail end of the boomer generation.

What happened after the war was the traditionalists came back from war, made a lot of babies in a very short period of time. This formed the boomer generation. As they grew, technology and consumerism really took off, and the economy grew. The traditionalist generation was small and had babies later than previous generations. They didnt have more(less really), just in a shorter period of time. Another factor was that infant mortality dropped.

This meant the first boomers had tons of opportunity for advancement in their career of choice. The last of the boomers entered a job market filled with youthful management, and so they stayed at the entry level positions, and were disparaged as slackers. Unfair. They were really trapped in career gridlock.

As they aged, their elder cohorts aged ahead of them, continually filling the higher positions of management in society. At some point in the 80s, they had spent a good 20 years near the bottom of the work force, firmly labeled as lazy, and considered as unfit for management("if you had any ambition you would have gone somewhere years ago!").

At this point they started to be passed over; the yuppies(young urban professionals) started advancing into management. Born in the late 60s to mid 70s, this was the bust generation.

You see, what had happened is that the boomers were(and are) the ultimate consumers. Faced with a choice of less freedom,less toys, and a flowerchild notion of world overpopulation, they chose less kids. If you have ever heard that our birthrate is less than the amount needed to sustain western society, this is why. Even the generation X people had less kids. They had less money; they couldnt afford it.

The boomers love the baby busters. They were right there at the right time to start filling the boomers shoes.

Now the children of the bust generation are coming into adulthood. They are the echo generation, and they are a larger group than the bust generation. Filled with the ideals of their parents and grandparents, they are consumerist and sexually active at an early age; they are the result of socially acceptable promiscuity and multiple marriages.

We can expect the echo generation to have large families as well. With the draining of social security by the boomers and gen X, people will depend more on family for support of elders. As well, rising food and fuel costs will bring labour/production back to local economies, necessitating local production.

If you want to see a real gen Xer, look to that 55+ year old that is bagging groceries, filling gas, sweeping the floor at the mall..

Also, it varies from country to country.

Here in Canada, most soldiers returned at the end of the European campaigns of world war two, while Americans continued on in the south pacific. Canada's started earlier and lasted longer. The American one was slower to start but ended later.

Europe, devastated and poor at the end of WWII, didnt really have a baby boom. Countries with less involvement had much smaller ones.

A lot more about our western societies can be understood by looking at the generations prior to the boomers. For example, the traditionalists were a small generation because many of them were born in the great depression. It really explains the idea of "get a good education and get a good job". The former no longer ensures the latter. Maybe that is also why they had so many kids.

The parents of the traditionalists might be called the flapper generation, and they spent their early adult lives in the roaring 20s. They were very positive and idealistic people. The rise of automobiles, telephone and radio and recorded music made their lives exciting times. They were born at the end of the Victorian age(which really ended in 1901).

The late Victorians were also a generation that was resistant to change. Raised in the world of horses and decentralized society, they did not understand or embrace the changes that the flappers enjoyed.

I'm not going any farther back. You can see the beginnings of patterns of large and small generations, traditionalism verses progressivism.

I think in the coming generations you can expect more babies. Elder-centric populations value them greatly.

You can expect war to be increasingly unpopular in western societies. As third world countries reach population equilibrium, they too will adopt a similar mindset. They will come to a point where very large families are unsustainable and youth will be prized.

When I say that western society will have more babies, I dont mean a lot more. More on the order of three or possibly four children per family.

Unfortunately you can also expect education to be less prized. The cultural heros of the echo generation are the musicians and sports heros. They made their money irrespective of education, and this is what the echos dream of. The echos are having families before finishing their educations as well. Those with free educations(like smart aspies) will find an advantage.

Interesting. I'll have to think on this for a response. But I can say:

My parents were born prior to the great depression. I guess you could say their parents were from the Victorian era (born 1884 and 1891, respectively). They were servant-class, something that doesn't really exist anymore. My father went off to the war and then did what a lot of soldiers did when he returned - had several children. Partially because he was Catholic, and religion plays a large part in a lot of family planning: birth control is verboten, and there was only one realistic method available at that time anyway. He came back, most pleased to still be alive, and proceeded to verify that repeatedly.

I was born when he was in his late 40s. We were blue collar, not white collar. (And that mattered and still does matter, as far as I can tell, in the workplace. Talk to a minimum-wage farm worker about "Gen X" and "Gen Y" and they'll think you've been in the sun too long.) My father was the first in his family to go to college and he did benefit from that in an era where the USA had, for all intents and purposes, unlimited resources and hadn't been physically shredded by the war. Jobs were there and a lot of his co-workers had been left behind, planted in the fields of Europe and on unnamed Pacific Islands. Women were shoved back into the home even if they'd been working, so their jobs were available. (Speaking in very general terms there.) Provisioning the rest of the world gave us one hell of an economic boost.

Eventually, of course, the rest of the world rebuilt. Hence came serious competition. By the time I entered the workforce we were smack in the middle of Jimmy Carter and "stag-flation" where there was no reason to save, because the money wasn't going to be worth tomorrow what it was today and wages didn't keep up. We never knew from day to day if the job was even going to be there tomorrow. We'd just come through Watergate and having it rubbed in our faces that the government'd lied there, they'd lied about Vietnam, they lied through the teeth whenever their lips moved.... Some of my friends had a hard time dealing with that, having watched so many of their friends get shot to pieces for that same government.

Anyway, I picked a high-tech field, went into it via on-the-job training, and did well. Until the economic downturn of the mid-80s, when I ended up unemployed and a parent myself. I didn't go to college until the late 80s-early 90s so I was in the same college culture as people born 20+ years after me and I picked some of that up. So, given all of that, given the social class thing, the sub-cultural thing, the era in which I went through "Middle-Class-Finishing-School" and got my degrees.... I have to say that the original post is useful as a discussion aid only, because it's entirely too narrow and linear in focus.

The subsequent posts, well, I'll have to think on those a bit before I respond.

My traditionalist parents (b. 1930 d. 1996, b. 1936 d. 2003) had Gen X kids (1970, 1972) because Mom was unable to have kids during the Baby Boom years (history of miscarriage).

At the rate I am going I am beginning to wonder IF I ever have kids will they be Generation Z.

I saw the Millenials on 60 Minutes and that hits it on the head.

I had the opportunity to care for Dad (1996) and Mom somewhat (1996-2002) before they died- they had cancer. Dad's was much quicker onset, multiple myleoma, and killed in three to five years. He might have died earlier but he survived and emerged from coma. I believe he opted for hospice and not to take aggressive treatment. On the other hand, Mom's breast cancer took 15 years from benign symptoms.

I think a man named Easterlin highlighted that very same hypothesis for the job prospects for young people in the 1950s vs. 1960s vs 1970s

Traditionalists

1. Not many babies born 1920s, 1930s
2. Many never came back from war
3. Racism, sexism
4. GI Bill stimulated college education
5. Every other country except neutrals and America in ruins (every major country except America in ruins), chance to rebuild world with the Marshall Plan, stimulated the economy, postwar military defense spending and wars, interstate highway project, space race

Baby Booms

1. Many babies born 1946-1964
2. Countries rebuilt, West Germany, Japan, were protected by United States, Japan prohibited from having military, economic competition
3. Racial and gender equality
4. Federal student aid, 1965
5. Vietnam war stimulated college and grad school attendance (I added this)

Christopher Jencks a sociologist suggested that education serves as a competitive function. If education were equal, employers would use something else to screen people with.

The fewer Western and American babies we have, the less world resources we consume. Adoption is more Earth friendly.

I read an article last week (forget the magazine name) but it was about single men who are getting vasectomies. Obviously they have decided never to have kids. That is intriguing.

In family sociology we read that 6% of women decided to never have kids. I wonder what percentage of men decided that. Probably a lot higher.