Timing is (Not?) Everything

Americans generally claim that what you get in life is mainly a result of what you put in, your talents and your effort.

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Yet it hard to deny that, often, factors outside a person’s control have major consequences – such as the year the person was born. This post is about what some social scientists have called the intersection of biography and history, when turning points in individuals’ lives coincide with turning points in history.

One critical life transition is looking for that first job. And young people entering the job market now are severely disadvantaged by the fact, totally outside of their control, that their parents conceived them in the late 1980s instead of earlier.

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Boomer Blues

A June 6 story in the New York Times, “Rise in Suicides of Middle-Aged is Continuing,” reported that 45-to-54 year-olds have the highest rate of suicide and that their rate is rising (– see here and a complex follow-up on June 13 here ). Although there are technical reasons to put a big asterisk on that claim* [see endnote below], it appears to be true that Baby Boomers’ lives have turned out to be a bit different — in unfortunate ways — from those of their parents and of their children. Americans who came into adulthood in the ‘60s were distinct.

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“The Sixties,” in a social and cultural sense, probably ran from about 1964 to about 1974, when the bulk of the Baby Boomers were under 18. They (I should say “we”) had a doubly-marked experience: First, Americans born between roughly 1946-48 and 1960-64 grew up in the largest cohort ever (largest until the 2000s, when of course the whole American population was about 50 percent larger); and second, the Boomers grew up in a time of great cultural turmoil. The two facts may well have been connected.

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