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David Cameron, 43, the new prime minister of Great Britain, is a Gen Xer. He was born Oct. 9, 1966.
Born Aug. 4, 1961, President Barack Obama, 48, is a baby boomer. Baby boomers were born from 1946 to 1964.
I’m still reading articles that say Obama isn’t a boomer. Some talk about Generation Jones, a term coined by Jonathan Pontell, who argues the boom began in 1942 and ended in 1953. Generation Jones doesn’t have any official status.
However, one post I read recently on the usually accurate ConsumerAffairs.com, called Obama a Gen Xer.
In the post "Boomers Face Challenges Relating to Other Generations," Jan Yager, the Web site’s boomer writer, said:
President Barack Obama is the first member of Generation X to become President of the United States. One of the hallmarks of President Obama’s presidential campaign was how comfortable he was using technology to communicate with his supporters, including his active participation on Twitter, as well as his own admission of how pivotal his Blackberry was to his ability to communicate with his close circle of friends.
Yager is wrong. While Obama may not want to associate himself with baby boomers, perhaps due to their "excesses," he is one.
Now David Cameron, there’s a Gen X leader.
Actually, there is far more than “some talk” about Obama being a member of Generation Jones. In reality, the vast majority of experts have specifically said that Obama is a Joneser; far fewer experts have said he is a Boomer or Xer.
Why are you using the old U.S. 1946-1964 birth years for the U.K.? Do you assume that if those years were used in the U.S., that means they must be used in England? They have never used those years for Boomers there, and even in the U.S. that old ’46-’64 definition has become pretty obsolete. That was the only birth range that used to be used for U.S. Boomers, now very few actual experts still use those birth years.
In fact, almost no one in England, or anywhere else, has referred to Cameron as an Xer. On the other hand, many experts and commentators have been referring to Cameron and his coalition partner Nick Clegg as members of Generation Jones, which is commonly thought of in the U.K. as born between 1955-1967.
And what on earth does it mean when you talk about “official status” for a generation? You’re right that GenJones doesn’t have “official status”. Nor do the Boomers or Xers or any other generation living today or ever in history.
Who would designate this “official status” anyway? Certainly the government wouldn’t. Some people who aren’t knowledgeable about generations sometimes assume that because the U.S. Census Bureau refers to Boomers that they are looking at Boomers as a generation. As people who actually are experienced with this subject matter know, the Census Bureau does not in any way define generations. The Bureau only looks at demographic phenomena in this regard. So they talk about the demographic ’46-’64 birth boom which is certainly relevant for the Bureau. The Bureau does lots of grouping together of different demographic groups based on population size, geography, etc. When the Bureau groups together people in the Southwest, for example, that doesn’t mean they are saying those people are a generation any more than when they group together people based on population sizes. And if the Bureau were involved in defining generations, why don’t they ever refer to GenJones or GenX or GenY or any other generation? The answer is that they don’t define generations, and only reference Boomers as a demographic population grouping, not as a generation in any way.
Sorry to go on for so long about this, but I’m just trying to understand what you could possibly mean by “official status” since I know for a fact there isn’t anything like that with generations. But I don’t mean to imply that you would have thought that the Census Bureau gives “official status” to generations, since I would think anybody with a site called a Boomer Guide would have at least a basic knowledge about generations, so would certainly realize that the Bureau doesn’t do that at all.