Tag Archives: Baby Boomers

The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

By Bruce Handy, March 2, 2023

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It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.

I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.

When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

Source: The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

Baby Boomers more likely to have multiple health issues than earlier generations | StudyFinds

By John Anderer, June 14, 2022

(© bernardbodo – stock.adobe.com)

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Baby boomers are more likely to live with numerous chronic health conditions than earlier generations, according to new research from Penn State and Texas State University.

Study authors warn that the growing rate of multiple chronic health conditions (multimorbidity) among older Americans represents a real health threat to the nation.

If it continues, this trend will almost certainly place increased strain on the well-being of older adults, medical infrastructures, and federal insurance systems.

On a related note, the amount of Americans over 65 is projected to increase by an astounding 50 percent by 2050.

Source: Baby Boomers more likely to have multiple health issues than earlier generations – Study Finds

Baby boomers retiring will affect the economy – here’s how | MSN money

By Alan Jones, 6 days ago

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Baby boomers retiring will affect the economy – here’s how North America went through a period known as the ‘baby boom’ after World War II, in which birth rates shot up dramatically for about two decades.

The first members of this generation reached retirement age in 2011, and the continued departure of baby boomers from the labour force is impacting the economy in interesting new ways.

Editor’s Note: See the link below to see the slideshow story…

Source: Baby boomers retiring will affect the economy – here’s how

Rising number of Baby Boomers retirements may create ‘eye-opening’ changes, jobs, business, economy, Dayton, Kettering | Dayton daily news

Local News | July 17, 2021, By Nick Blizzard

The growing number of Baby Boomer retirements nationwide is accelerating, raising concerns locally about losing a large chunk of the workforce sooner than expected.

Data shows nearly 6 million more Boomers in the U.S. retired from October 2020 through March of this year than the same period a year prior, creating a larger void than anticipated in an economy seeking to fill jobs across an array of industries and recover from the woes of the coronavirus pandemic.

Source: Rising number of Baby Boomers retirements may create ‘eye-opening’ changes, jobs, business, economy, Dayton, Kettering

Baby Boomer Migration Tilts Toward Las Vegas, Tampa And Phoenix

Editors’ Pick | Apr 28, 2021,03:23pm EDT | 517 views

Brenda Richardson, Senior Contributor, Real Estate, I cover residential real estate, including buying, selling and trends.

Sunny retirement locations are still a big draw for Baby Boomers.
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Baby Boomers are the wealthiest generation of Americans alive today, and while some may no longer be active in the housing market, plenty are still looking to buy homes.

But where are Baby Boomers looking to buy? To answer this question, LendingTree analyzed mortgage purchase requests made in 2020 on the LendingTree platform across the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.

Here’s what the study found:

Las Vegas, Tampa and Phoenix are the metros where Baby Boomers make up the largest share of mortgage purchase requests. In Las Vegas, 19.97% of purchase requests came from Baby Boomers. In Tampa and Phoenix, the numbers are 17.33% and 16.36%, respectively.

–from article
Continue reading Baby Boomer Migration Tilts Toward Las Vegas, Tampa And Phoenix

Baby Boomers Still the Spine of Independent Book Selling – ABC News

This 2013 photo provided by Changing Hands Bookstore shows, owner Gayle Shanks, in the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz. In 1974, Shanks was a 23-year-old idealist raised on the activism of the previous decade and anxious to make a difference herself. "Books had changed my life and I assumed they could change other people's lives as well," says Shanks, whose Changing Hands Bookstore is now among the country's leading independent sellers. (Kristi Church/Changing Hands Bookstore via AP)
This 2013 photo provided by Changing Hands Bookstore shows, owner Gayle Shanks, in the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz. In 1974, Shanks was a 23-year-old idealist raised on the activism of the previous decade and anxious to make a difference herself. “Books had changed my life and I assumed they could change other people’s lives as well,” says Shanks, whose Changing Hands Bookstore is now among the country’s leading independent sellers. (Kristi Church/Changing Hands Bookstore via AP)

Baby Boomers Still the Spine of Independent Book Selling

Bookstores have a long history as allies and nurturers of social movements, and a generation of owners came of age when works ranging from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” to Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” were an integral part of the uprisings of the ’60s and ’70s.Shanks, Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, and Kris Kleindienst of Left Bank Books in St. Louis are among many baby boomers who founded stores with little sense of how to run a business, but a profound sense of purpose. They are now pillars of a smaller but still vital independent-bookstore community, and models for the wave of younger owners who have opened stores in recent years.

Source: Baby Boomers Still the Spine of Independent Book Selling – ABC News