Baby Boomers are the generational cohort born during the pronounced post-Second World War birth-rate surge, generally dated from approximately 1946 to 1964, a demographic category first defined by the United States Census Bureau and widely adopted afterward in sociological and market-research literature across other countries with comparable postwar birth surges. The cohort's large relative size has been documented as a major driver of postwar social and economic change in the countries where it is most studied, including expansion of primary and secondary education systems in the 1950s-60s, the counterculture and civil-rights-era social movements of the 1960s-70s as the cohort reached young adulthood, and, more recently, documented strain on pension and healthcare systems as the cohort has moved into retirement age. Generational-cohort categories of this kind are treated in sociological literature as useful but imprecise heuristics, generalizing across what are, on closer study, widely varying individual experiences within the same birth years.
Facts
Group TypeSourced to the subject's own account Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountPrimarily documented in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and other countries with a comparable postwar birth-rate surge 1 Population EstimateSourced to the subject's own accountapproximately 70 million in the United States alone (birth cohort) 1 Sources
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