Life Inside the Population Bulge
The scared, scrambling lives of the Boomies

By Philip Marchand
(October, 1979, Saturday Night Magazine)

It is now twenty years since the birth rate in Canada started its long slide from the peak years of the baby boom when it approached four children for every woman of childbearing age. In those years, the birth rate plunged to the point (now about 1.8 children per woman of childbearing age) where it cannot go much lower unless childbirth becomes entirely unfashionable. The result is that we have a unique bulge in our population, the children born between the war and the late 1960s - the children of the famous post-war baby boom, known fondly to some demographers as Boomies. The usual image of this bulge moving through the various age groups of the population is that of a lump passing through the belly of a snake, causing the snake to swell as the creature slowly moves down its long passage to death.

The most important thing about the baby boom is its uniqueness. We may never have another one like it. Birth rates tend to go up in times of prosperity, and the Western world after the Second World War experienced an unprecedented economic upsurge. Cheap energy, new technologies, widespread "optimism" - all these heated up the economy and the maternity wards. But these factors seem unlikely to recur. By 1965 the first of the Boomies were reaching adulthood, and the boom was definitely over.

The children born between 1945 and the early 1960s - about 6 million in this country - will exercise, by sheer numbers, a disproportionate influence on the society they live in. And they will experience a great many problems no other age group will face. Consider the Canadian Boomie in four of his aspects:

The Boomie as Corporate Employee

The Boomie has been educated to an extent that would startle our ancestors. In the 1960s, for example, enrolments in secondary schools rose by eight per cent a year, in post-secondary institutions by eleven per cent. It was an interesting decade to be in the teaching profession. It was also an interesting decade to be a university graduate. For the first Boomies with university degrees, job-hunting was pleasant, given the opportunities available - though not as pleasant as the job-hunting prospects of those who had graduated just before them. A university graduate in the early 1960s faced a business world that had a short supply of young managerial talent (particularly degree-owning talent) - the low-fertility rate of the 1930s and the buoyant economic atmosphere of the post-war years ensured that. Governments were also launching a wide range of social programmes. In those long-ago days, when it was inconceivable that someone like Sinclair ("Slasher") Stevens would ever be president of the Treasury Board in Ottawa, an axiom among the young was that "you could always get a job in the government." Certainly you could always get a job teaching.

Robert Myhill, president of a Toronto advertising agency, himself part of the group born a few years ahead of the Boomies, recalls: "The careers of so many of these people have been unprecedented: And it's not because they're so bright, or smarter than other people, but because the circumstances of the time allowed them to look so shiny. The young people behind them are having a hell of a time trying to push them out of the way." A good dividing line for separating the Ins from the Outs is 1952. That was the first year in Canadian history when more than 400,000 babies were born. According to John Kettle, a futurist who spends his time studying these things, a person born in 1952 or the dozen years that followed it now has a twenty-five per cent smaller chance of being promoted to middle management than those born before 1952.

The Boomie as Consumer

Lowered expectations or no, the Boomies won't prove to be any slouches when it comes to consuming. Of course, it may be a different kind of consumption. In Canada, for example, it is safe to say that owning a house is now only a dream for most Boomies. In the future, owning a car may also represent an investment too formidable for all but the most affluent. But there will still be a good deal of "discretionary" income. Boomies have few children, if they have any. Putting money into insurance or savings accounts in these inflationary times may become increasingly unpopular among the Boomies. But if discretionary income begins to lag, Boomies show no reluctance to draw on credit to maintain their habit of consuming. Their generation has taken to credit cards with a fondness that helps to explain why Canadian banks keep getting richer and richer.

How will the Boomies spend their discretionary dollars as they move through adulthood? Marketing and advertising people assume, first of all, that this is a relatively sophisticated group of buyers. Consumers as sophisticated and television-wise as the Boomies naturally want products more distinctive than the ones their parents bought. Ian Wilson , a corporate planner with General Electric in the United States comments: "This generation has put more of a premium on individual needs, or the individualization of the way they want to express themselves - there's less of a mass market. They want a range of options they can select from so that even with a mass-produced item you'll almost get to the point where no two items look alike."

To state the case in its simplest terms, a Boomie is in the future more likely to buy a limited-edition print (stores selling these prints are now beginning to multiply) than the posters he once doted on. Ideally, a Boomie would like limited editions in everything - clothes, wines, even cars. But this, unfortunately, conflicts with a second major imperative of Boomie consumerism - the need to fit in with the "consumer society". As Edward Harvey predicts: "I think in some respects the Boomies are even more consumption oriented than the generation that preceded them, but it will be a different kind of consumption. It will have to be ecologically, certifiably `good' consumption."

The Boomie as Parent

The desire to consume obviously works against the desire to conceive. Since Boomies are great consumers, Boomies are not big on parenthood. The Boomie who is a full-time mother is almost a disappearing phenomenon. In the 1971 census, fifteen per cent of married women between twenty-five and twenty-nine reported that they has chosen not to have children - as opposed to eight per cent in 1961. Many observers feel the current rate is closer to twenty per cent. Women who do choose to have children have fewer children, eight because of economic necessity or because more children would interfere with other goals. Feminism has obviously had its impact. The participation rate for women in the labour force in all age categories has steadily increased over the last quarter-century. In 1953, for example, 92.9 per cent of men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four worked; 47.2 per cent of the women. In 1979, for the same age group 85.2 per cent of the men worked and 74. per cent of the women.

The trend to equal numbers of men and women working is likely to culminate with the baby-boom generation. That trend has brought with it not only fewer marriages, more childless marriages, and smaller families in general, but also, inescapably, less stability for families of any kind. The soaring number of divorces has many causes, but none of these is likely to diminish as the last of the Boomies approach adulthood. Single-parent families increased at three times the rate of two-parent families between 1966 and 1971. If anything, the rate has gone up in the years since. A study published in The Futurist magazine claims that forty-five per cent of American children born in 1976 will have lived with a single parent some time before reaching the age of eighteen.

These statistics indicate that the children of the Boomies may see less of mother and/oe father than any generation in Canadian history. They may be the world's first day-care generation. (Except for the lucky few who have nannies - an increasing feature of affluent Boomie households.)

The Boomie as Conservative

The first Boomies, those born between 1945 and 1952 impressed society with their radical openness to change. The real radicals in that generation were a small minority, but they heavily influenced the rest. They influenced it to the extent that, when the first wave of Boomies arrived at the traditional age of adolescent rebellion, the whole society suddenly felt the shock waves of rebellion. (Now, when the first Boomies are discovering the perils of middle-age spread, the whole society suddenly feels the urgency of physical fitness.)

The Boomies born after 1952, however, have come to maturity in a world whose limits are far more obvious than they were in the late 1960s. Economic realities have made the limits obvious - realities like the end of cheap energy and increasing competition from industrialized countries like South Korea and Japan. Another reality is the massive, collective sibling rivalry any Boomie must feel, particularly one born after 1952 - too many brothers and sisters going after jobs, houses, imported wines, driving up the prices and creating scarcity mentality.

The younger the Boomie, the more scared and nervous he's likely to be about this situation. This accounts for the profound conservatism often found among students. Most of these students are aware that the unemployment rate for the age group fifteen to twenty-four is around fifteen per cent. Most of them are aware that the older brothers and sisters have had serious problems getting the jobs they were trained for in university.

In some ways the students now, the late Boomies, are like the students of the 1950s; but in other ways they are not. In the university campuses, it is certainly true that the sparkle and fizz of the late 1960s and early 1970s have completely disappeared. But it is also true that the "conservatism" of these students is less a 1950s-style acceptance of the values of their society than a recognition of the need to work hard in order to survive.

The Boomies will be faced with severe competition for the rest of their lives. Their mid-life crises, coming at a point when they realize they won't be promoted, their salaries won't keep up with inflation, will be mid-life crises such as the world has never seen.

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