Читать книгу It’s All Their Fault - Neil Boorman - Страница 13

The demographic model of the UK population looks like the side profile of your average middle-aged man: skinny chest and legs, and a great big sagging belly and arse in the middle. The skinny upper torso is the ‘Silent Generation’, in other words our grandparents, who were born before 1946. The skinny legs at the bottom are Generation Debt, born after 1964. The great big muffin top in the middle is the Baby Boomer generation, a population explosion that followed the Second World War.

The outbreak of peace in 1945 brought a tidal wave of euphoria to our grandparents, millions of whom returned home from the war to start new families. In the early Fifties, the majority of young suburban wives fell pregnant, which resulted in a sharp rise in births during the post-war years – the Baby Boom. By the end of the Boom in 1964, a whopping 11 million babies had been born.

You might think that we could have benefited equally, but with the advent of the Pill, birth control was so cheap, easy and effective that millions of Boomers put off having children until much later. This explains why our generation is so small in comparison.