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Baby boomers are people born during the demographic post–World War II baby boom approximately between the years 1946 and 1964, giving an age range between and as of . According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the term "baby boomer" is also used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise date definition, even within a given territory. Different groups, organizations, individuals, and scholars may have widely varying opinions on what constitutes a baby boomer, both technically and culturally. Ascribing universal attributes to a broad generation is difficult, and some observers believe that it is inherently impossible. Nonetheless, many people have attempted to determine the broad cultural similarities and historical impact of the generation, and thus the term has gained widespread popular usage. Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence. As a group, they were the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.〔 They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; therefore, they could reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive. One feature of the boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave"〔 and as "the pig in the python." The term Generation Jones has sometimes been used to distinguish those born from 1957 onward from the earlier Baby Boomers.〔Noveck, Jocelyn (2009-01-11), "In Obama, many see an end to the baby boomer era". ().〕 ==Definition== The phrase baby boom refers to a noticeable increase in the birth rate. The post-war population increase was first described as a "boom" by Sylvia F. Porter in a column in the May 4, 1951, edition of the ''New York Post'', based on the 2,357,000 increase in the population of the U.S. in 1950.〔Reader's Digest August 1951 pg. 5〕 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "baby boomer" is from 1970 in an article in ''The Washington Post''.〔Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "(baby, n. and adj. )"〕 Various authors have delimited the baby boom period differently. The United States Census Bureau considers a baby boomer to be someone born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and 1964. Landon Jones, in his book ''Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation'' (1980), defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1943 through 1960, when annual births increased over 4,000,000. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the social generation of Boomers as that cohort born from 1943 to 1960, who were too young to have any personal memory of World War II, but old enough to remember the postwar American High. In the U.S., the generation can be segmented into two broadly defined cohorts: The Leading-Edge Baby Boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1955, those who came of age during the Vietnam War era. This group represents slightly more than half of the generation, or roughly 38,002,000 people of all races. The other half of the generation was born between 1956 and 1964. Called Late Boomers, or Trailing-Edge Boomers, this second cohort includes about 37,818,000 individuals, according to Live Births by Age and Mother and Race, 1933–98, published by the Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics. An ongoing battle for "generational ownership" has motivated a handful of marketing mavens and cultural commentators to coin and/or promote their own terms for sub‑segments of the baby-boomer generation. These monikers include, but are not limited to, "golden boomers", "generation Jones", "alpha boomers", "yuppies", "zoomers", and "cuspers". Advocates of these "cultural segments" are often zealous and overstated in their attempts to redefine generational boundaries, often claiming wide adoption and sometimes advancing self-promotional agendas . In Ontario, Canada, one attempt to define the boom came from David Foot, author of ''Boom, Bust and Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st century'', published in 1997 and 2000. He defines a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966, the years that more than 400,000 babies were born. However, he acknowledges that is a demographic definition, and that culturally it may not be as clear-cut. Doug Owram argues that the Canadian boom took place from 1943 to 1960, but that culturally boomers (everywhere) were born between the late war years and about 1955 or 1956. He notes that those born in the years before the actual boom were often the most influential people among boomers; for example, musicians such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones, or writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who were either slightly or vastly older than the boomer generation. Those born in the 1960s might feel disconnected from the cultural identifiers of the earlier boomers. Bernard Salt places the Australian baby boom between 1943 and 1960,〔() 〕 while the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines the boom as 1946 to 1964. Another definition for the Baby Boom is the decade after the Second World War, that is 1946 to 1955. This date range in the US correlates neatly with the strongest cultural identifiers of the boomer generation, i.e., the involvement of the US in the Vietnam War and the draft. In 1973, the U.S. both ended its draft and moved to an all volunteer army (the other services were already volunteer only) and ended its military activity in Vietnam. Of course, males born in 1953-1955 could not have foreseen the end of the draft or the war and "came of age" fully internalizing those events. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Baby boomers」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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