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Generation Jones: The Demographic Group No One Talks About
The oldest members of a demographic group that no one talks about are now applying for Medicare. Will they retire, or will they help to define the Future of Work?
In the United States, people born between 1957 and 1964 are labeled Late Baby Boomers. And yet, some well informed academics and demographers call this Baby Boomer-tagalong cohort Generation Jones. Its members emerged during a time of buoyant post-war optimism, peaked during [manned] spaceflight, and ended in the wake of the JFK assassination and American military involvement in Vietnam.
I am a “Gen Jones” member who was born in 1961. And, without a doubt, our most famous member — born that same year — is President Barack Obama. In a January 2009 blog post, I cited this Wikipedia description:
“Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of “jonesing” is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.”
To jones is to chill. And, indeed, we chilled in front of the television for hours at a time. We also spent lavishly. By the time I graduated high school, I had acquired enough LP records to fill six milk crates. On weekends during my high school years, if I wasn’t working selling men’s shoes at the mall, one could find me at the cinema.
But we were also strivers. Jonesers ascended the corporate ladder like older Baby Boomers.
And yet, we accumulated considerably more debt along the way. Case in point: first-year college tuition, room, and board at Cornell…
