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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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...

> 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?

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