Page 94 - The Drucker Lectures

Structural Changes in the World Economy and Society [ 75

three figures, you are going to make serious mistakes, and most
of my friends have done so, because they did not understand that
the population structure is changing drastically.
In all the developed countries of the Free World, from Japan
to West Germany, there was after World War II a baby boom of
varying lengths and varying intensities—something totally un-
precedented. After World War II in this country, the number of
children born jumped almost 50 percent in four years. Following
the baby boom in all of these countries, there has been a baby
bust beginning in 1960–1961, again unprecedented, in which
the number of births dropped 25 percent. It has not yet gone up
even though everybody, beginning with myself, had predicted it
must. And so we had a very short period in which we had a very
large number of young people entering the labor force.
Anybody who looked at population figures in the last year
of Mr. Eisenhower could predict that we would have a youth
decade. What form it would take, you couldn’t predict. But the
center of gravity of the American population, that with an age
cohort that is both the largest and the rapidly growing one, was
age 39 in 1959. Five years later, when Lyndon Johnson had be-
come president, it was age 17. No such swing has ever occurred
before in peacetime. It had to have consequences.
Actually, there was nothing really different that happened.
The kids behaved the way teenagers behave normally—except it
suddenly mattered, whereas when they did it in the ’40s it didn’t
matter because they were not the center of population gravity.
And just at the time when such august people as [legal and so-
cial scholar] Charles Reich of Yale predicted the “Greening of
America” it was over, simply because by that time the age of
the center of gravity of the population was already beginning
to move up very fast. It is now already at the age of 27 or 28.
Young adults are the center of gravity. They are the largest and
most rapidly growing group because our birth rate collapsed in