Things they do look awful cold (talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin' 'bout my generation)
—My Generation, The Who, 1965
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Nancy Schaadt and Christopher Haight, are a married couple of Baby Boomers born 10 years apart who feel like they’re from two separate generations.
As the Portland, Oregon, couple’s experience shows, the massive Baby Boom generation encompasses people born over nearly two decades who came of age during a tumultuous period of change that actually spawned at least two groups with different cultural, demographic and financial experiences.
Schaadt, born in 1962, grew up listening to new wave music, like the Clash and Elvis Costello. Haight’s a classic rocker born in 1952 whose soundtrack included Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. When President John F. Kennedy was shot, she was 2 and has no memory; he was 11 and was “gobsmacked” when some kids with conservative parents applauded.
He escaped military conscription into the Vietnam War when he drew a high lottery number. His cousin fled to Canada. To Nancy, Vietnam was “really nothing.” The war, she says, “didn’t touch me at all.”
A Baby Boomer by any other name
All of this raises the question: How do you determine who constitutes a generation? Answers vary. But for Baby Boomers, the largest (at its peak) and possibly most influential generation in, well, generations, a generally accepted definition encompasses anyone born between 1946 and 1964 — people reaching the ages of 60 to 78 this year.
Coincidentally, we are now deciding a presidential election in which the two main candidates were born in 1946 and 1964. That’s right. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris begin and end the Baby Boom generation.
The Baby Boomer name, of course, comes from the boom in births in the U.S. following World War II. (To be technical, researchers recognized by the Census Bureau place Harris’s October 20 birth a few months after the boom ended and Trump’s June 14 birthday a few weeks before its start.)
But it’s almost impossible to find more different Boomers than Trump and Harris. They neatly illustrate the diversity and variety that marks the sprawling generation.
“We have a lot of evidence that there really is a divide between the older Baby Boomers and the younger Baby Boomers,” says David Schultz (born in 1958), political science professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., who co-authored a book, Generational Politics in the United States From the Silents to Gen Z and Beyond.
The things that shape generations — Schultz calls them “socializing influences” — are events that happen when members are adolescents, as they move away from the influence of their parents and form their own ideas and identities. Individuals, of course, have other influences — economic, racial, class, familial, gender, religious — but the big defining moments create generation-wide views.
Trump and Harris are good examples. They have radically different backgrounds and socializing influences. Born to wealth and privilege, Trump turned 21 when Lyndon Johnson was president, while Harris, who grew up in far more modest means, reached that age during the Ronald Reagan administration.
Trump’s early Boomer cohort came of age during the Vietnam War, witnessed the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr., partied through the Summer of Love and Woodstock and watched men walk on the Moon. The Harris age group’s influences included gas lines, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, Saturday Night Live and MTV.
Enter Generation Jones
Many younger Boomers actually claim membership in a separate generation, Generation Jones. (The name has a couple of different meanings, including the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses” and the slang of jonesing or yearning for something.) There are Facebook groups under the banner of Generation Jones, described as born between 1954 and 1965. Some Jonesers scold others who call them Boomers.
One prominent Joneser, Barack Obama, born in 1961 to a free-spirited 18-year-old mother, has said he doesn’t relate to Boomers. He told an interviewer for The Atlantic in 2007, “When I think of Baby Boomers, I think of my mother’s generation. And you know, I was too young for the formative period of the ’60s civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by.”
The split becomes more apparent when considering that the legal benefits and responsibilities of maturity have been a moving target for Boomers and another source of differing experiences. While the earliest male Boomers faced a mandatory draft at 18, they couldn’t vote at that age until the 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971 — when Trump was 25 and Harris was 6.
Trump was 28 in 1974, when women were legally granted the right to credit in their own names. Harris was 10.
As Boomers grew up, many states lowered the legal drinking age to 18. But in 1984, the federal government forced states to raise the drinking age to 21. That year, Trump turned 38. Harris turned 20.
Changing economics
Older Boomers grew up cradled in America's post-war prosperity — a suburban housing boom, new highways, new schools, virtually lifetime employment and generous company pensions for blue- and white-collar workers alike. But by the time the younger Boomers were reaching maturity, that prosperity was fading. Inflation-adjusted wages began to decline in the early 1970s and continued falling for 20 years. In 1978, 401(k) retirement plans were born; soon they were replacing pensions. In 1983, full retirement age (FRA) — when full Social Security benefits become available — began inching up to 67 for people born after 1960.
Today, younger Boomers have significantly less wealth than older Boomers. “Late Boomers saw a weakening in the link between work and wealth due to the Great Recession” of 2008, concluded a study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Younger Boomers “were in their 40s during the Great Recession, and this economic calamity appears to have hit them particularly hard. Their employment rate — that is, the percentage of individuals working — dropped sharply. More importantly, the percentage of the cohort working did not rebound as the economy recovered.”
Even among those who kept their jobs, the Great Recession took a greater toll on late Boomers than on their older peers, the study found. “When late Boomers reached their 40s, their average earnings flattened out and then declined continuously thereafter, leaving them in their 50s with earnings generally well below those of early and mid-Boomers.”
All the while, the relationship between employers and workers shifted as young Boomers came of age, says Diana Elliott, vice president, U.S. Programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research organization focused on improving health and well-being.
“So there absolutely was an expectation among older Boomers to have a job and stay with an employer,” says Elliot, a member of Gen X. “That relationship to work and an employer has changed over time, and some of that reflects the changing nature of how employers view workers and how workers view their relationship with work. … There's more expectation that you will change employers now than there was among those older Baby Boomers.”
Retirement uncertainty
As the Boston College study noted, late Boomers are the first cohort of workers who could have spent their entire careers covered by 401(k) plans.
“There was more emphasis on 401(k)s and transferring that risk away from employers to individual workers,” says Elliot. The overall effect of this change is not yet apparent because many younger Boomers haven’t retired, Elliott says. But it could mean less financial security in retirement for younger Boomers. “We don't know what the future will hold.”
On the plus side, younger women Boomers may be in better shape than older women, says Elliot. Although they are more likely to be divorced and have fewer children, younger women are more also likely to achieve financial independence, go to college and have careers beyond stereotypical positions such as secretaries or teachers. “It has been transformative,” Elliot says. “Kamala Harris is a good example of somebody who was able to pursue an education and pursue a career that was on her own terms.”
So long, Boomers
Whoever wins the election, they could well be the last president from the Baby Boom generation — there have been four. The vanguard of Gen X will be 63 in four years — only seven have been older when elected. And the oldest Millennials will be 47 — six have been that age or younger. The torch is passing, and for many coming up today, none too soon.
“There's a lot of tension between Boomers and Millennials,” says author Lawrence R. Samuel (1954). “They tell us, ‘OK Boomer.’ It's embarrassing to now admit you're a Baby Boomer.”
As kids, Boomers were considered spoiled and juvenile delinquents who needed psychiatrists, says Samuel, writer of The Rise and Fall of Baby Boomers: The Long, Strange Trip of a Generation. “In the 1960s and ’70s, we were just trying to discover ourselves and people were blaming us for being lazy. Then we did get jobs in the ’80s and ’90s, then we were accused of being workaholics and making too much money and buying big houses. We could never win.”
If that criticism of a younger generation sounds familiar, even today, there’s a reason. “Every generation tries to distance itself from the previous one throughout American history,” Samuel says. “Every generation tries to create its own identity. It's just the way it goes in both directions, too, because older generations will kind of look down on subsequent generations. Kids aren't as good, aren't as smart as they didn't have it like we had it, or we had to work harder, or we had to be smarter or we were more respectful.”
Despite their difference, as the first and last of the Boomers, both Trump and Harris share something. They’re “cuspers” — a word used by workplace consultant Meagan Johnson (1970) to describe people born at the beginning or end of a generation who have the ability to identify both with their own and the other generation they are close to.
“Cuspers seem to have a little bit more of an organic ability to flex between the two generations,” explains Johnson, who co-authored a book with her father, Larry Johnson (1948), Generations Inc.: From Boomers to Linksters — Managing the Friction between Generations at Work. They’re no doubt on to something. All indications are that Harris will fare better among younger voters while Trump will do better among older ones.
But let’s face it, as generational bookends, neither Trump nor Harris would likely have felt at home at Woodstock. Neither really fits the typical Baby Boomer cliché images of young hippies out to radically change the world. And to be honest, neither do most Boomers. “Our data suggest that the vast majority of the Baby Boomers were probably more centrist and conservative, than we think,” says political scientist David Schultz, “and that the liberals that we heard or saw on campuses were probably more the exception than the rule.”
Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.
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