Take A Number: Millennials Set To Outnumber Baby Boomers
75 The approximate number, in millions, of millennials that the United States will have this year. The total of millennials — those born from 1981 to 1997 — will reach 75.3 million, overtaking baby boomers (1946 to 1964) as the United States’ largest living generation.
How does a generation that has stopped enrolling members manage to keep growing? An influx of immigrants, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. And, of course, members of the boomer generation, currently at 74.9 million, are beginning to die in greater numbers.
But deciding who belongs to which generation is neither an exact science nor a settled debate. While demographers long ago agreed on the dates defining the baby boom, many young people now considered millennials could one day be reclassified into the following generation (whatever we decide to call it).
“In order to do my analysis, I needed to define who is the youngest millennial,” said Richard Fry, a senior research associate at Pew and author of the report. “But it’s not clear yet when the millennials have ended and the next generation began.”
In the years to come, demographers will sift through all sorts of evidence to arrive at a final date range. If it turns out that people born in 1997 have more in common socially and politically with those born in, say, 1994 than those born in 1985, they could be reassigned, instantly shrinking today’s millennial mass by several million members.
Indeed, there are signs that today’s 18-year-olds do not really fit in.
“One of the defining events typically associated with millennials is that they grew up experiencing 9/11,” Mr. Fry said. But those born in 1997 “would have been 5 years old when the attacks happened,” not usually an age when global events leave formative impressions.
These sorts of judgment calls are the reason Generation X remains smaller than those before and after it (leading to the nickname The Middle Child Generation). Generation X is defined as people born from 1965 through 1980 — not just a time when fewer children were born in the United States, but at 16 years, a relative short period in demographic terms.
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There is power in numbers, and the size of the millennial generation will carry some benefits for its members.
For one, expect the often-maligned generation to push back against negative stereotyping, said Jeffrey Arnett, a psychologist at Clark University who has written extensively on millennials.
“They are tired of being stereotyped by boomers, whom they view as ruining the world for them,” he said. “This could allow them to demand more respect than they’ve gotten so far.” Perhaps more important, it will give them “more power in the conversation about where American society should go in particular.”
With so many members, millennials are likely to wield more power in the workplace, too, said Jan K. Vink, a demographer at Cornell University.
“You will have more young people with less experience” making up the work force, he said. “It will affect productivity, but also opportunity. With a generation retiring, there will be more opportunities for people to move up in the work force.”
But don’t be too quick to draw any conclusions based on the assumption that birth date determines character, Dr. Vink said.
“People tend to add social characteristics to a certain generation, but you cannot tie that to a year of birth,” he said. “Just like some people like to tie some generalization to race or religion, you cannot put everybody in the same couple of years in the same box.”
Especially when there are 75 million of them, give or take.
