Hello babies, welcome to Earth. You’ve shown up at an interesting time. Every 40 years or so, the United States demographic pyramid squeezes a bit. Some combination of cycling birth rates and global catastrophe conspire to make a dip. A trench. A crater. You’re lucky enough to be born into one. I’m very sorry.
The dip in 1900 was not immediate, but imposed as those children came of age just in time to be shipped off and killed in the first World War. The Great Depression and World War II generated a second dip through the 1940’s, made more pronounced by the huge swell of Boomers coming after.
The last crater happened around 1980 at the hinge between Generation X and Millennials. There are some interesting lessons to be learned from their experience. My experience. I was born in 1977 when the depths of the dip were really gearing up. It’s happening again in the 2020’s, and these crater kids will be graduating high school in 2040. Babies, here’s what you’re going to need to know.
Generation not enough
First, the bad news. There’s simply not enough of you to matter. There are less people in your cohort than there are in the large mass ahead of you. In 2018, there were 19 million children aged 0 to 4. This was down 5% from the 21 million kids in the 5-9 cohort just ahead of them. Four years later, there’s again 19 million 0 to 4 year olds. This may be the crater floor.
Some numbers suggest birth rates are increasing, but nothing like a post-pandemic baby boom. Many would-be parents find the world is simply too bleak. This birth rate increase would need to sustain for several years before we see an ascending curve. We may be on the crater floor for a while.
So, running 5% off the cohorts ahead of you sucks. Everyone that spends money, from government to advertisers, are going to glaze right past you as their attention focuses on the population bulge ahead of you.
This will impact schools. Districts make their projections over relatively short terms and with very tight margins. A decrease of 5% could mean 30 kids in a school, and that’s the difference in a teacher. Over a 50,000 child school district, that’s 2,500 kids, or 100 student classrooms. High schools run 2,000 kids. In the name of austerity, your population crater will be used to justify cuts.
This will impact your ability to work, make a living, and find a home. Just as with schools, programs will be cut because demand will decrease. Like community colleges and downtowns are gutted in the 1980’s. Or they’ll be cut budgets because folks in front of you used the programs a lot and you don’t have the clout to stop it from being demonized as a moral failing. Think about mental health, or public housing, or taking student loans out of bankruptcy. The rules are a moving target. And they’re moving away from you.
Your small cohort will impact everything that’s important to you. There were plenty of folks in my crater that were concerned about the environment, but we were stuck being told to recycle more and buy less hair spray. It wasn’t until Millennials started being concerned en masse that it returned to front pages. Cannabis legalization, LGBTQ+ rights, and many other “new” movements existed but couldn’t find a critical mass in the smaller cohort.
Generation not you
Now, the worse news. Crater kids are either a half a step ahead or a half a step behind. Some of this will depend on having older or younger siblings. Babysat by my older cousin, I knew Breakfast Club and Fast Times. I was told to hide my eyes behind a pillow for the sexy parts. My younger brothers kept us knee deep in Pokemon and Alf, but I wasn’t encouraged to play as I was too old to do those little kid things.
The same pulses happened in music. All of grunge was amazing and transcendent and probably a lot of it was lost on a weird 14 year old viewing it through MTV. Then you get to the point where you have some money to spend on concerts and music has shifted to Britney Spears. Suddenly, the entire HFStival lineup in Baltimore is populated with nostalgia acts. Always the trailing edge of something finished or the leading edge before something bigger.
It gets really dicey when the crater divides two sides of an ideology. Like the health and nutrition advice that was targeted towards Boomers in the 80’s but is widely discredited now. Unlike that time, we know teeth shouldn’t be brushed vigorously with the stiffest brush possible. Don’t replace fat with aspartame. Newfangled drugs like Prozac do not replace therapy. Your health will be forever changed as your parents are sold experiments on their own.
