Slide 10 of 38
Notes:
The baby boom occurred from 1946 to 1964.
It is ironic that this presentation talks about projections of the aging of the baby boom generation, because the boom itself is one of the famous historical examples of projections going wildly wrong. A small boom was anticipated after World War II. When the birth rate started to go down again in 1948, it looked like everything was going according to predictions. Demographers believed that birth rates, following the trend established in the years before the war, would reach an all-time low.
There are many ways that women could have responded to the relative prosperity of the post-war years, but as a group they responded by deciding to have about 1 extra child per family, which led to historically large numbers of babies being born.
