Edward Tenner: Do Baby Boomers Exist?
[Edward Tenner is a historian of technology and culture. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center and holds a Ph.D in European history.]
Can you have more in common with a person almost twenty years younger than with somebody one year older? That's the logical conclusion of conventional journalism about the "Baby Boomers," which has been a staple of journalists and editors ever since my friend Landon Jones' Great Expectations (1980). And it has just come into relief in a feature in USA Today.
None of the scholars or lay people interviewed in the article considers the possibility that the variety of experience of the older and younger Baby Boomers should lead us to question the validity or power of the concept. I wondered whether the writer might be overlooking dissenters, so I did a Google search for "myth of the baby boom" (just four results) and "myth of the baby boomers" (10 results, some duplicates). In an age of universal revisionism, when so many new books deny everything from global warming to natural selection, I couldn't even find a single instance of the question "Is the baby boom a myth?"...
Read entire article at The Atlantic
Can you have more in common with a person almost twenty years younger than with somebody one year older? That's the logical conclusion of conventional journalism about the "Baby Boomers," which has been a staple of journalists and editors ever since my friend Landon Jones' Great Expectations (1980). And it has just come into relief in a feature in USA Today.
None of the scholars or lay people interviewed in the article considers the possibility that the variety of experience of the older and younger Baby Boomers should lead us to question the validity or power of the concept. I wondered whether the writer might be overlooking dissenters, so I did a Google search for "myth of the baby boom" (just four results) and "myth of the baby boomers" (10 results, some duplicates). In an age of universal revisionism, when so many new books deny everything from global warming to natural selection, I couldn't even find a single instance of the question "Is the baby boom a myth?"...