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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these "trends" can easily be explained by the fact that millennials, aka the largest generation in the U.S., are aging. When they were young, many were willing to move. Now that they're older, many are no longer willing to move. The younger generation (Gen Z) is smaller, so, measured proportionally, fewer overall are willing to move.

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This seems to imply a boom and bust population cycle. Are generations really demographic pulses as you describe? I thought they were just artificial cutoffs.

> This seems to imply a boom and bust population cycle.

There is literally a generation called "baby boomer." And, their children are called millennials.

Right. I had learned that boomers were a democratic pulse caused by the end of WWII and resulting period of prosperity. This thread is teaching me that there is at least one echo of that pulse in the US (millennials). I'm not convinced that humans are r-strategists, though, or that there's an intrinsic generational oscillation in our total population. Should I be?

> Are generations really demographic pulses as you describe?

Here[1] is the US population pyramid. You can clearly see the small increases and decreases at various ages - a demographic pulse, as you said. There is a significant decline in the echo currently at ~14 in that image. I would note that early adulthood tends to bring in more immigration (people moving for university and staying), so I wouldn't read too much into it at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Population_Pyramid.sv...

Fascinating. I'd like to see a version of this with generations marked. It seems like there are more peaks than generations. For example, there's a peak at age 50 and another around age 60.

that peak (late 1960s) is where the youngest boomers started to have children while some of the silent generation still were. This [1] animated chart makes it even more clear. Just for comparison, Canada [2] is even more exaggerated

As to the generations - those are still just useful generalizations. As soon as you start digging into it, you start seeing all the edge cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_demographic_compositio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canada_2023_Population_Py...

> The younger generation (Gen Z) is smaller, so, measured proportionally, fewer overall are willing to move

It is true that Gen Z is smaller than Millennials but not by much. Millennials are 21.67% of the US population and Gen Z are 20.88% (Gen X is 19.61%, Boomers 20.58%, Silent Generation 5.49%, and Greatest Generation 0.2%) [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...

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