The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm

Appendix A. The Older Generations

There are five distinct generations alive in the United States today. The bulk of this book deals with the last three of these, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the Echo Boomers, or Gen Y. As explained in this book, only two of these generations—the Boomers and Gen Y—can yield worthwhile returns on a marketer’s investment because they follow small generations and therefore spawn expanding markets. Small generations that follow large ones get dwarfed by them. The Silent Generation, as with Generation X later, lives in the wake of an enormous generation, the GI Generation.