Baby Boomer or OK Boomer?

The huge post-war cohort who reshaped the Western world

Reaping the benefits, facing their children and grandchildren's criticism

Generation calculator Which is your generation?

The conversation better start with some hard facts

No need to define the term "boom", is it? It's not just a powerful sound, it's also suggesting a pretty fast increase, be it economic or demographic. Baby Boomers point to the vast numbers of babies born after Second World War. Their arrival en masse (about 76 million people born in the US between 1946 and 1964) led to a rapid succession of changes. Society was never the same after the 60's and 70's, when baby-boomers, reaching that age when changing the world is a very tempting project, proceeded accordingly.

Flower-power was accompanied by riding a wave of rising prosperity. Market expansion, creating more jobs, helped too and the generation itself ended up by amassing an impressive amount of wealth. In 2024, about half of US wealth was owned by the baby-boomers. Predictably, it's a fact not easily digested by the younger generations.

It's not easy being a baby-boomer, some say

As if to 'karmically' compensate for financial comfort, baby-boomers had to face the digital revolution that must have left some of them a bit disoriented, to say the least. Paper money, spreadsheets and talking to a real human in a real call centre getting obsolete. Visits from close or distant family being replaced by a screen with unsatisfactory resolution for older eyes and souls. Even retirement safety nets began getting less safe, as life expectancy increases and actuarial predictions are overtaken by reality. In the Western part of the world, that means older and older societies, without enough births to make up for the deaths.

Follow the money though, it might wipe off inter-generational envy

What is going to happen to all that baby boomer wealth after all? As no one can take anything beyond the final frontier, it will be inherited, in a will or lifetime gifts, donated or spent. Not to mention what the taxman gets too. Each of these kinds of transfer has its own trajectory, suffice to say that the next decade or so is expected to see a lot of asset movement in the direction of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, as well as some Millennials (1981-1996).

Baby-boomers, pretty often seen as a bit out-of-date while sitting on top of a lot of goodies they are not prepared to share, acquired online fame as well through a phrase coined in 2019, apparently. "OK Boomer" can mean many things in a sarcastic way, it is definitely not a term of endearment. So what?

It would be enough to imagine how the newest generation, Alpha, is going to snigger at its grandparents, some X-ers, some others Millennials. The latter, digital natives, will have prepared the ground for the current AI tsunami (for lack of a better word) to be enjoyed among the Zoomers (generation Z, 1997-2012).

Which generation are you and the people in your extended family? Do you have any friends outside your generation?