What is Demography?
Demography is the scientific study of population growth and change.
Everything in society influences demography and demography conversely influences everything in society. After World War II, the United States began to recover from the long-term negative effects of the war. Families had been separated, relatives died or were injured, and women who had gone to the factories then returned home at war's end.
For about 4 years, goods and services were rationed and the government had assumed war-time powers which they thought limited the civil rights of the average citizen. It was an era of social and cultural upheaval.
The postwar year 1946 reflected the impact of that upheaval in its very atypical demographic statistics. Starting in 1946, people married younger, had more children, divorced then remarried again, and kept having one child after another. From 1946 to 1956 the birth rate rose and peaked, then began to decline again. By 1964 the national high birth rate was finally back to the level it was at in 1946.
All those millions of children born from 1946-1964 are called the Baby Boom Generation.
The millions of deaths caused by the war, the long-term separation of family members from one another, and the deep shifts toward conservative values all contributed to the rising family rates. The "baby boom" had landed. After the baby boom generation was in place, it conversely affected personal and larger social levels of society in every conceivable way.
You probably recall some of those social concerns from the lesson on aging and birth cohorts. The baby boom generation is a birth cohort that has had and will continue to have a major impact on the lives of everyone else in the United States. The baby boomers are now retiring and aging. What impact will this have on the rest of the country? Do we have the medical care for such a large aging population? What about financial resources like Social Security?
