Re: Could it be....

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Sat, 4 Jan 2003 19:56:12 -0800 (PST), Bob Nelson <raccoonradio@yahoo.com> said:

> I'm not sure where the boomer generation officially
> ended-- 1960? 1964? I was born in '62 (will be 41
> next month) and do consider myself a boomer rather
> than an X-er.

Strauss and Howe[1] would have it:

Name		Birth Years	Collective Lifecycle	National Figures
G.I.		1901-1924	1901-2004		JFK, RWR, G.H.W. Bush
Silent		1925-1942	1925-2022		Cheney, Ted Kennedy
Boom		1943-1960	1943-2040		Clinton, G.W. Bush
13th		1961-1981	1961-2061		John Sununu (Jr.)
Millennial	1982-2003	1982-2083		McCaughey septuplets

There are specific, historiographic reasons why they chose the
boundary years they did; read the book to find out more.  These
reasons drove them to recognize somewhat different years for the boom
generation than birth statistics indicate for the baby boom itself.
(Strauss and Howe also eschew the meaningless `X' and `Y' tags applied
by contemporary mass media, for which I too have little use.)

-GAWollman

[1] William Strauss and Neil Howe. /Generations: The History of
America's Future 1584 to 2069/.  New York: Morrow, 1990.  Quotation
from Figure 6-6, ``The Generational Cycle in America'', fold-out after
p. 96, except rightmost column.[2]

[2] Editorial comment: If you haven't read this book, and care
anything about American History, go to your nearest public library and
ask for it.  Dewey Decimal is 973 dc20; LC is E179.S89 1990.  Strauss
and Howe have been plugging this particular generational theory of
history for the past ten years, and there are other books further
expounding the idea with respect to specific cohorts, but this book is
the original work and the observations in it about modern-day
generations are still trenchant twelve years later.  This was the book
that in 1990 predicted the Clinton victory over Bush in 1992 (although
not by name).