![]() ![]() One school of economic thought suggests that the baby boom in the 1950s was caused by rising male incomes and falling women's wages (as women were displaced from wartime jobs), while in the later decades falling male income and rising female wages generated the baby bust (Butz and Ward). Spent in caring for children and hence a significant element in the cost of raising children. The female wage is assumed to represent the value of time foregone in the labor market in favor of childbearing: the "opportunity cost" or "price" of women's time They assume that fertility will tend to rise as male income rises, but fall when material aspirations increase and when female wages rise. Their focus has been primarily on three factors: male income, the female wage, and material aspirations (desired standard of living). Economists have attempted to develop a "unified theory" to explain both the boom and bust. Exhilaration and optimism after the war seemed to combine with a general feeling of affluence in a booming postwar economy, and generous provisions for returning GIs, to make young couples feel able and willing to support children (Bean Jones).īut this apparently positive relationship between income and fertility fails to explain why fertility rates then suddenly plummeted in the early 1960s, causing the "baby bust." There was a tendency at the time to attribute the decline to the introduction of the birth control pill in 1963 -but it is generally acknowledged now that the pill merely facilitated a trend that originated several years earlier, in the late 1950s. But in addition younger women departed from a historic upward trend in female labor force participation in order to stay home and start families -a departure that lasted for nearly twenty years. They account for most of the immediate 1946 – 1947 "spike" in births associated with returning For many older women these were births postponed during the Depression and World War II. ![]() ![]() The majority of it occurred not through an increase in family size but rather through a sharp decline in the proportion of women choosing to remain childless (Westoff). There is no consensus regarding the cause of the baby boom: social scientists suggest a complex mixture of economic, social, and psychological factors. Nevertheless, despite their declining share in total population, they do and will remain a characteristic bulge in the age structure throughout their lifetime. As they retire their numbers will grow relative to the size of the working-age population, until in 2030 there will be three retired baby boomers for every ten workers (and about four retirees in total for every ten workers -a ratio projected to remain fairly constant thereafter). Census.) Following the boom in 1965, 38 percent of the total population were baby boomers, but by 2050 their share is projected to drop to only 5 percent, with eighteen million surviving at age eighty-five or older in that year. (The population estimates and medium projections are taken from the 2000 U.S. There are approximately seventy-nine million baby boomers in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century: about 29 percent of the total population. Figure 2 compares the baby booms in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Iceland, nations that experienced the most pronounced and prolonged booms. However, the term "baby boomer" has tended to be used most commonly in reference to those born in the United States -and they are the focus of this entry. Similar baby booms occurred during the same period in many other western industrialized nations, with peak fertility rates in Canada, New Zealand, and Iceland even higher than those in the United States. That imprint included the creation of an "echo boom" of births during the 1980s and 1990s.īecause the baby boom lasted nearly twenty years, many have objected to treating the baby boomers as a single cohort, associating younger baby boomers more with " Generation X" than with older baby boomers -but the original appellation has held through the years, and tends still to refer to the entire population bulge produced during the boom. The baby boom is defined as having occurred during the peak years of this roller coaster ride: its legacy was a population bulge destined to leave its imprint on each phase of the life cycle. ![]() Total births per year during that period grew from 2.3 million to 4.3 million and then fell to 3.2 million. All races, religions, and ethnic groups participated in the boom. As illustrated in Figure 1, in the post – World War II period the General Fertility Rate (GFR) in the United States rose from what had been an all-time low in 1936 of 75.8 children per 1,000 women of childbearing age to a high of 122.7 in 1957 -and then fell to a new all-time low of 65.0 in 1976. Baby boomers are all those born in the United States between 19. ![]()
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