1958: Generation Jones

Generation Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Generation Jones is a name for a demographic group born in the United States, and sometimes Canada, from 1954 through 1965. They are called this due to a decline in the birth rate; specifically, the U.S. birth rate fell for eleven consecutive years after 1957, the longest such decline in American history. The name is intended to contrast with the term "Baby Boomer"; indeed, the central purpose of its usage appears to be to deny Boomer affiliation on behalf of those born from 1958 through 1964, thus rejecting the mass media's widespread practice of observing 1960 or even 1964 as the baby boom's cutoff date. Approximately 43 million people were born in the United States during the years of the actual "bust;" adding immigrants and subtracting deaths of those born during this period, it is believed that about 41 million persons born during these years were alive in the United States as of the end of 2003.

The first identification of baby busters in this context appears to have been made by anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927-2001) in his 1981 book America Now (later re-released under the title Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life). In 1987, the word twentysomething was coined, an apparent back-formation of Thirtysomething, the title of a then-popular Baby Boomer-themed television series. Douglas Coupland's groundbreaking 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture was dedicated to "the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s," and in the following year's Presidential election the "under-35 generation" was frequently cited as the core supporters of third-party candidate Ross Perot. In his 2001 book, The Isolation Generation, Dean Anderson identifies a generation labeled the Pre-Lunar Space-Agers as having been born between the launch of Sputnik (October 4, 1957) and the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20, 1969), thus making 1958 through 1968 the group's full birth years.

The psychographic position of the Jones Generation and how they relate to neighboring generations has been the subject of considerable debate. Some insist that they constitute an entirely separate group, between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, while others reckon them as an older subset of Generation X. The combination of the aforementioned dedication of Douglas Coupland's novel followed by the media obsession with "twentysomethings" that persisted well into the 1990s has only served to heighten the confusion.

Another frequently-encountered description of Jones Generation consists of the span of birth years 1965 through 1976 in the US. These years lie in between the end of Baby Boom (1964, beginning in 1946) and the beginning of the Echo Baby Boom (1977, ending in 1994 and sometimes known as "Generation Y," even though birth rates began a seven-year dip in 1991, this being the second longest such streak in modern history after the eleven-year decline of 1958-68 already alluded to), the conceptual children of the Baby Boomers. As plotted against a normal distribution curve, the Baby Boom had its apex in 1957 (4.3 million births), and was followed by a decline in births but was still a relatively large number of births (remaining at 4 million or above through 1964). The US Census Bureau defines the dearth in births from 1965 through 1976 in terms of demographic birth cohorts as the Baby Bust, although many in the advertising industry prefer to observe 1978 as the last such year (with Generation Y commencing with those born in 1979).

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