By Prof Les Mayhew and David Sinclair

Policymakers, service providers and marketing folk alike love their generational labels. It’s proved useful as a way of collecting a group of people born and living at the same time. These groups are then assumed to have similar values, experiences, needs and wishes. But while the boomers can more easily be identified, later generational labels, imported from the US, are increasingly out of kilter with reality in the UK.

Over recent decades, much of the debate on intergenerational unfairness has been about the polarisation of “baby boomers” against “millennials”. The baby boomers are deemed to have been very fortunate to have grown up in a growing economy where house prices were low, economic growth was high and wages increased more than inflation. Millennials, on the other hand, are deemed to be a group living in a period where they can’t afford to buy a home.

The use of generational cohorts is now pretty commonplace in society. Marketeers can talk about what Gen Zs or Millennials believe and contrast that with the views of the baby boomers or Gen Xers. Policymakers can argue that the baby boomers benefited from low house prices and use that as justification for incentives for younger people to get onto the housing market. Service providers can adapt their offer for different generations.

The reality is much more complex of course. Most post-war boomers didn’t have access to the same information, travel and education opportunities that Millennials do. Social exclusion today effects young and old, but in different ways. But that isn’t the point of this blog. We aren’t here to pitch one generation against another. Instead, what we want to explore is whether we need to consider whether the value of the generational cohort is increasingly irrelevant.

There is a popular perception that there has only been one baby boom and that was immediately after 1945. The reality is different. Whilst obviously not the same interval or amplitude as the post war boom, there have been several booms since 1945. There have been four so far and we predict a fifth around 2041.

These baby booms echo at regular intervals and can be used for example to predict the demand for house building, education, pension provision, retirement etc. Yet we are failing to do to this adequately.

The fertility cycle in the UK is 25-26 years trough to trough or 12-13 years peak to trough. That means that one “generation” replaces another after an average of 25-26 years. This bandwidth is fairly constant. It may widen as women have their first child later but there’s no evidence of that yet. But is this still applicable today and how do these cycles map against our generational cohorts that we so often hear about in news and media?

Whilst the Boomers do map to the fertility cycle, the same can’t be said of the subsequent “generations”. The terms Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z are US imports, but the age bandwidths have grown increasingly out of line with the reality of the UK fertility cycle. For example, Gen X is based on a peak to trough cycle of only 15 years, compared to the UK average of 12-13 years.

Gen Y (or Millennials) for example is supposed to run from 1981 to 1996, but the chart shows that 1978 to 1990 would have been more accurate. In fact, Gen Z (defined from 1997 to 2012) is even more adrift although interestingly there is a significant culture clash between Gen Z and Gen Y.

The creation of generations by marketing organisations may make planning more difficult. While the post war boomer generation is easy to identify on the graph below, it’s clear that more modern generations no longer relate in the same way to earlier population booms.

Not only do the generational labels no longer line up with population booms, it’s arguable that differences within generations are now much more significant than in the past. The growth of sub-cultures may mean that the generation someone is born into is less relevant than ever before. With the growth in the number of TV channels for example, generation perhaps have fewer shared experiences with their peers.

So while policymakers and planners have followed the artificially created US generations, perhaps there is a time for a rethink. Whilst generational labels may be less useful than the past in terms of common experiences, they are, now also pretty useless in predicting for example, the peak demand for products and services as well as where we might see troughs in supply of labour, the demand for childcare, school places or university enrolment.

New labels are therefore needed. However, there is an issue of whether the length of the cycle should be trough to trough or peak to peak or trough to peak etc. Again there is no consistency – thus we can see that Gen X is trough to peak and that Gen Y is peak to trough. We had initially thought that Gen Z would be the last in the line – if only because we run out of alphabet. We now learn there is going to be a Gen ‘alpha’!

The other point seen in the charts is that the amplitude of the peaks is smaller than it was in the original post-war boom years and is gradually flattening out as women have fewer children. It means, for example, that future boomers will tend to blend in more and decades such as the 60s, when many new universities were built to cater for the burgeoning demand for university education, are a thing of the past. It seems unlikely that this situation will ever be repeated.

Have these sobriquets therefore lost their purpose? They are a marketing device based on bulges in people born around the same time which iterate regularly down the line when those in the earlier bulge start to have children of their own. As long as this is borne in mind and the marketing industry aligns itself with reality, they probably have a purpose. We note finally that the concept does not produce corresponding peaks and troughs in deaths for simple reason that we all live unequal lives. But it is certainly true to say that the increases in the number of older people can be traced to the first boom in 1945. It might be better if the industry paid them as much attention.