Standards of living and economic prospects After the Second World War, the United States offered massive financial assistance to Western European nations in the form of the
Marshall Plan to rebuild themselves and to extend U.S. economic and political influence. The Soviet Union did the same for Eastern Europe with the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. This was a time of optimism, economic prosperity, and a growing middle class. In some instances, the rate of technological change was so rapid even when compared to optimistic projections, so much so that some social theorists of the day warned of boredom for the
housewife. Demand for housing exploded. Governments both in the East and the West massively subsidized housing with many
public housing projects in urban areas in the form of high-rise apartment buildings. In many cases, this came at the cost of destroying historical sites.
suburban communities began developing their own entertainment quarters and
shopping malls. In the United States, vaccination against measles resulted in not only falling childhood mortality rates but also other positive life outcomes such as rising family income. In the West, average life expectancy increased by about seven years between the 1930s and 1960s. Prosperity was taken for granted. Indeed, for older boomers who came of age in the 1960s, the interwar experience of mass unemployment and stable or falling prices was confined to the history books, and
full employment and inflation were the norm. Those with higher standards of living and educational levels were often the most demanding of betterment. The new-found wealth allowed many Western governments to finance generous welfare programs. By the 1970s, all industrialized capitalist nations had become welfare states. But when the 'Golden Age' came to an end, such government largess proved problematic. In the United States, at least, the onset of a recession—as defined by the
National Bureau of Economic Research—typically occurred within a few years of a peak in the rate of change of the young-adult population, both positive and negative, and indeed, the recession of the mid-1970s took place shortly after older boomers' growth peak in the late 1960s. Members of the
Silent Generation found themselves in an abundance of employment opportunities as they entered the workforce in the 1950s. In fact, they could expect to achieve parity with their fathers' wages at the entrance level. This, however, was not the case for Jonesers. By the mid-1980s, younger boomers could only expect to make a third of what their fathers made as new entrants to the labor force. Chairman
Mao Zedong introduced a plan for the rapid industrialization of his country, the
Great Leap Forward. Monetary income was replaced by six basic services: food, healthcare, education, haircuts, funerals, and movies. Mao's plan was quickly abandoned, not just because it failed, but also because of the Great Famine. Yet despite the disastrous results of
Maoist policies, by the standards of the developing world, China was not doing so poorly. By the mid-1970s, China's food consumption measured in calories was just above the global median and the nation's life expectancy grew steadily, interrupted only by the famine years. Between 1960 and 1975, the Chinese mainland's growth was fast, but lagged behind the
growth of Japan and the rise of the
Four Asian Tigers (
South Korea,
Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and
Singapore) grew even faster. In the 1980s,
James R. Flynn examined psychometric data and discovered evidence that the
IQ scores of Americans were increasing significantly between the early 1930s and late 1970s. On average, younger cohorts scored higher than their elders. This was confirmed by later studies and on data in other countries; the discovery became known as the
Flynn effect. During the postwar era, the importance of modern mathematics—especially mathematical logic, optimization, and numerical analysis—was acknowledged for its usefulness during the war. From this sprang proposals for reforms in mathematics education. The international movement to bring about such reforms was launched in the late 1950s, with heavy French influence. In France, they also grew out of a desire to bring the subject as it was taught in schools closer to the research done by pure mathematicians, particularly the
Nicholas Bourbaki school, which emphasized an austere and abstract style of doing mathematics,
axiomatization. Up until the 1950s, the purpose of primary education was to prepare students for life and future careers. This changed in the 1960s. A commission headed by
André Lichnerowicz was established to work out the details of the desired reforms in mathematics education. At the same time, the French government mandated that the same courses be taught to all schoolchildren, regardless of their career prospects and aspirations. Thus the same highly abstract courses in mathematics were taught to not just those willing and able to pursue university studies but also those who left school early to join the workforce. From elementary school to the
French Baccalaureate,
Euclidean geometry and
calculus were de-emphasized in favor of
set theory and
abstract algebra. This conception of mass public education was inherited from the interwar period and was taken for granted; the model for the elites was to be applied to all segments of society. But by the early 1970s, the Commission ran into problems. Mathematicians, physicists, members of professional societies, economists, and industrial leaders criticized the reforms as being suitable for neither schoolteachers nor students. Many teachers were ill-prepared and ill-equipped. One member of the Lichnerowicz Commission asked, "Should we teach outdated mathematics to less intelligent children?" Lichnerowicz resigned and the commission was disbanded in 1973. In the United States, the "
New Math" initiative—under which students received lessons in set theory, which is what mathematicians actually use to construct the set of real numbers, something advanced undergraduates learned in a course on
real analysis, and arithmetic with bases other than ten—was similarly unsuccessful, Nevertheless, the influence of the Bourbaki school in mathematics education lived on, as the Soviet mathematician
Vladimir Arnold recalled in a 1995 interview. Before World War II, the share of university-educated people in even the most advanced of industrialized nations, except the United States, a world leader in post-secondary education, was negligible. After the war, the number of university students skyrocketed, not just in the West, but also among developing countries as well. In Europe, between 1960 and 1980, the number of university students increased by a factor of four to five in West Germany, Ireland, and Greece, a factor of five to seven in Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Italy, and a factor of seven to nine in Spain and Norway. (1955–63) This surprising Soviet success demonstrated to the Americans that their education system had fallen behind.
Life magazine reported that three quarters of American high-school students took no physics at all. The U.S. government realized it needed thousands of scientists and engineers to match the might of its ideological rival. On President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's direct orders, science education underwent major reforms and the federal government started pouring enormous sums of money into not just education but also research and development. Private institutions, such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation provided funding for education, too. Authors felt inspired to cater to the physics textbook market, and one of the results was the
Berkeley Physics Course, a series for undergraduates influenced by MIT's
Physical Science Study Committee, formed right before the launch of
Sputnik. One of the most famous of textbooks from the
Berkeley series is
Electricity and Magnetism by Nobel laureate
Edward Mills Purcell, which has gone through multiple editions and remains in print in the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, there was a seemingly infinite number of Baby Boomers applying for admissions at institutions of higher learning in the U.S., so much so that many schools became extremely difficult to get into. This cooled off by the 1980s, though. In the end, about a quarter of Baby Boomers had at least a bachelor's degree. More women earned university degrees than ever before, and became professionals at an unprecedented rate. Because so many Baby Boomers pursued higher education, costs started to rise, making the Silent Generation the last cohort to benefit from tuition-free public universities anywhere in the United States. British physicist
Paul Dirac, who had relocated to the United States in the 1970s, opined to his colleagues he doubted the wisdom of educating so many undergraduates in science when so many of them had neither the interest nor the aptitude. Having a youth bulge can be seen as one factor among many in explaining social unrest and uprisings in society. Quantitative historian
Peter Turchin noted intensifying competition among graduates, whose numbers were larger than what the economy could absorb, a phenomenon he termed
elite overproduction, led to political polarization, social fragmentation, and even violence as many became disgruntled with their dim prospects despite having attained a high level of education. Income inequality, stagnating or declining real wages, and growing public debt were contributory factors. Turchin argued that having a
youth bulge and massive young population with university degrees were the key reasons for the instability of the 1960s and 1970s and predicted that the 2020s would see the pattern repeat itself. Because the baby boomers were a huge demographic cohort, when they entered the workforce they took up all the jobs they could find, including those below their skill levels. As a result, wages were depressed and many households needed two streams of income in order to pay their bills. and they often took positions that were, by the standards of their day, progressive. In Europe, and especially in the United Kingdom, the top soap operas typically featured working- or middle-class people, and most soap operas promoted post-war
social-democratic values. Following the Second World War, the United States was not just a land of peace and prosperity but also of anxiety and fear of cultural deviancy and ideological subversion. And one victim of said
moral panic was comic books. This culminated in the book
Seduction of the Innocent (1954) by
Fredric Wertham, Unlike those of the Golden Age, stories from the Silver Age moved away from horror, and crime. Plots shifted towards romance and
science fiction, deemed acceptable by the Code. For a variety of stories and characters, scientific-sounding concepts replaced magic and gods. Initially, many plots were
escapist fantasies and reflected the cultural zeitgeist of the day, featuring traditional
family values (with an emphasis on gender roles and marriage) as well as gender equality, But later, in parallel with the fomenting counterculture of the 1960s, comic books began addressing the social issues of the day, such as the civil-rights movement. Originally aimed at children, they soon attracted growing numbers of young adults; that the younger Baby Boomers had their imaginations fed by superhero comics ensured that this genre of fiction would remain in American popular culture well into the twenty-first century. But according to
Michael Cart, it was the 1960s that saw the maturing of novels for teenagers and young adults. One early example of this genre was
S. E. Hinton's
The Outsiders (1967). The novel features a truer, darker side of adolescent life that was not often represented in works of fiction of the time. Written during high school and written when Hinton was only 16,
The Outsiders also lacked the nostalgic tone common in books about adolescents written by adults.
The Outsiders remains one of the best-selling young-adult novels of all time. Blume was one of the first novelists who focused on such controversial topics as masturbation, menstruation, teen sex, birth control, and death.
Cultural influences ,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ernesto Che Guevara meeting in Cuba, 1960. They were some of the radical icons of the 1960s. In the West, those born in the years before the actual boom were often the most influential people among boomers. Some of these people were musicians such as
The Beatles,
Bob Dylan, and
The Rolling Stones; writers like
Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg,
Betty Friedan,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Herbert Marcuse, and other authors of the
Frankfurt School of Social Theory; and political leaders such as Mao Zedong,
Fidel Castro, and
Che Guevara. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the poet
Sylvia Plath encouraged their readers to question cultural norms. by questioning the era's social norms, in particular its insistence on traditional gender roles. to some extent defining the divided political landscape in the country. Leading-edge boomers are often associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the later years of the
civil rights movement, and the
second wave of feminism in the 1970s. On the other hand, trailing-edge boomers (also known as
Generation Jones) came of age in the "
malaise era" of the 1970s with events such as the
Watergate scandal, the
1973–1975 recession, the
1973 oil crisis, the
United States Bicentennial (1976), and the
Iranian hostage crisis (1979). Politically, early boomers in the United States tend to be Democrats, while later boomers tend to be Republicans. record on campus while sporting newly popularized blue jeans, 1970 During the 1960s and 1970s, the music industry made a fortune selling rock records to people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. This era was home to many youthful stars—people like
Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones,
Jimi Hendrix, or
Janis Joplin—who had lifestyles that all but guaranteed
their early deaths. Across the Anglosphere, and increasingly in many other countries, middle- and upper-class youths started adopting the popular culture of the lower-classes, in stark contrast with previous generations. In the United Kingdom, for instance, young people from wealthy families changed their accents to approximate how working-class people spoke, and were not averse to the occasional use of profanities.
Counterculture , May 1968 In the decades following the Second World War, cultural rebellion became a common feature in urbanized and industrialized societies, both East and West. In the context of the ideological competition of the
Cold War, governments sought to improve the material standards of living of their own citizens but also to encourage them to seek meaning in their daily lives. However, young people felt a sense of alienation and sought to assert their own individuality, freedom, and authenticity. Counterculture also affected Third World nations—those that chose to remain unaligned in the Cold War. In the Soviet Union, director of the Committee for State Security (
KGB)
Yuri Andropov became paranoid about the internal security. Under General Secretary
Leonid Brezhnev, the KGB amplified its efforts to suppress politically dissident voices, though the Soviet Union never quite returned to
Joseph Stalin's style of governance. With hindsight, the CIA's assessments proved overly pessimistic. These youth movements had a bark that was worse than their bite. Despite sounding radical, the proponents of counterculture did not exactly demand the complete destruction of society in order to build it anew; they only wanted to work within the confines of the
status quo to bring about the change they desired. Changes, if they came, were less well-organized than the activists themselves. Moreover, the loudest and most visible participants of counterculture often came from privileged backgrounds—with heretofore unheard-of access to higher education, material comfort, and leisure—which allowed them to feel secure enough in their activism. Counterculture was therefore not about material desires. Counterculture did, however, come with an entire pharmacopeia, including
marijuana, amphetamines (such as "
purple hearts"), and
magic mushrooms. But perhaps the most notorious was a substance known as "acid" or
lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Synthesized in 1938 by chemist
Albert Hoffmann in his quest to cure migraine, its use as a psychedelic drug was promoted in the 1960s by psychologist
Timothy Leary. Attempts to ban it in 1966 made the substance
even more popular. A number of cultural icons of the late 1960s, such as poet Allen Ginsberg were known for using this drug. While historians disagree over the influence of the
countercultural movements of the 1960s in American politics and society, they tend to describe it in similar terms. For instance, sociologist
Todd Gitlin calls it self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Moreover, it is possible that this movement did no more than creating new marketing segments for the specific sectors of the population, the "hip" crowd.
Protests and riots When they came of age during the late 1960s and 1970s, Baby Boomers immediately became politically active and made themselves heard due to the sheer size of their demographic cohort. In the Federal Republic of Germany (
West Germany), the 1950s was a period of strong economic growth and prosperity. But like so many other Western nations, it soon faced severe political polarization thanks to youth revolts. By the 1960s there was a general feeling of stagnation, which stimulated the creation of the primarily student-backed
Extra-parliamentary Opposition (APO). One of the goals of the APO was reforms to the university system of admissions and registration. One of the most prominent APO activists was
Rudi Dutschke, who declared "the
long march through the institutions" in the context of recruitment for the civil service. Another major student movement of this era was the
Red Army Faction (RAF), a militant
Marxist group most active in the 1970s and the 1980s. Members of the RAF believed the West German economic and political systems to be inhumane and
fascist; they looted stores, robbed banks, and kidnapped or assassinated West German businessmen, politicians, and judges. The RAF's reign of terror lasted until around 1993. It disbanded itself in 1998. The RAF turned out to be deadlier than its American counterpart, the
Weather Underground, which declared itself a "movement that fights, not just talks about fighting." Indeed, counterculture had by this time invited stern public backlash. Resistance to change heightened. Major governments around the world implemented various policies intended to ensure "
law and order". High-profile protestors such as the hippies who confronted the police were the target of public hostility and condemnation. Meanwhile, many American university students disapproved of their rebellious peers and concentrated on their studies. One side effect of the student revolts of the late-1960s was that it made unions and workers realize they could demand more from their employers. Nevertheless, after so many years of full employment and growing wages and benefits, the working class was simply uninterested in starting a revolution. In China, Chairman Mao in 1965 created the
Red Guards, which initially consisted mainly of students, to purge dissident CCP officials and intellectuals in general, as part of the Cultural Revolution. The result was general mayhem. Mao eventually opted to deploy the People's Liberation Army against his own Red Guards to restore public order.
Hippies and the Hippie Trail The youthful proponents of counterculture, known as the
hippies, disapproved of the modern world so much they sought refuge from it in
communes and
mystical religions. During the 1960s and 1970s, large groups of them could be found in any major European or American city. Male hippies wore long hair and grew beards, while female hippies eschewed anything that women traditionally wore to make themselves attractive, such as
makeup and
bras. Hippies were iconoclasts to varying degrees and rejected the traditional work ethic. They preferred love to money, feelings to facts, and natural things to manufactured items. They engaged in
casual sex and used various
hallucinogens. They were generally pacifists and pessimists. Many disliked politics and activism, though they were influenced by the political atmosphere of the time. A significant cultural event of this era was the
Woodstock Festival in August 1969, which drew huge crowds despite bad weather and a general lack of facilities. The so-called
Hippie Trail probably started in the mid-1950s, as expeditions of wealthy tourists and students traveling in small groups. They started from the United Kingdom, heading eastwards. As
Western European economies grew, so did demand for international travel; many bus services sprang up to serve tourists. The first hippies—initially used to refer to men with long hair—joined the trail in the late 1960s. Many young people were beguiled by
Eastern religions and mysticism, and they wanted to visit Asia to learn more. Others wanted to escape the conventional lifestyles of their home countries or saw opportunities for profit. Some smoked
marijuana and wished to visit the Middle East and
South Asia, where their favored products came from. But air travel was in its infancy at this time in history and was beyond the reach of most. For those seeking an adventure, traveling by long-distance bus and trains from Western Europe to Asia became an affordable alternative. But not all who traversed the Hippie Trail were from Europe. In fact, many hailed from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Visas were easily obtained and in some cases were not required at all. The Hippie Trail ended in 1979 with the
Iranian Revolution and the start of the
Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989).
Sexual revolution and feminism In the United Kingdom, the
Lady Chatterley trial (1959) and the first long-play of the Beatles,
Please Please Me (1963) were to begin the process of altering public perception of
human mating, a cause subsequently taken up by young people seeking personal liberation. In the United States, the
Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in May 1960 approved the first contraceptive pill, a drug that has had a huge impact on the nation's history. Invented by
Gregory Pincus in 1956,
the pill, as it is commonly called, marked the first time in human history when sexuality and reproduction can be reliably separated. The pill and antibiotics capable of curing various venereal diseases eliminated two leading arguments against extra-marital sex, paving the way for the
sexual revolution. and was part of mainstream youth culture through the 1980s, with teenagers beginning to go steady at progressively earlier ages. Sexologist
Alfred C. Kinsey's books,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1958), employed confidential interviews to proclaim that sexual behaviors previously deemed unusual were more common than people thought. Despite triggering a storm of criticisms, the
Kinsey Reports earned him the nickname the "Marx of the sexual revolution" due to their revolutionary influence. Many men and women celebrated their newfound freedom and had their satisfactions, but the sexual revolution also paved the way to new problems. Coupled with the sexual revolution was a new wave of feminism, as the relaxation of traditional views heightened women's awareness of what they might be able to change. Competition in the job market led many to demand equal pay for equal work and government-funded daycare services. Some groups, such as the
National Organization for Women (NOW) equated women's rights with civil rights and copied the tactics of black activists, demanding an
Equal Rights Amendment, changes to the divorce laws making them more favorable to women, and the legalization of abortion. "
The personal is political" became the motto for the
second wave of feminism. Although the new feminist movement germinated in the United States in the 1960s, initially to address the concerns of middle-class women, thanks to the appearance of the word 'sex' in the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was primarily intended to prohibit racial discrimination, it quickly spread to other Western nations in the 1970s and especially the 1980s. More women realized how much power they had as a group and they made use of it immediately, as can be seen in reforms regarding divorce and abortion laws in Italy, for example.
Marriage and family Marriage in many developed countries became much less stable in the 1980s, when Baby Boomers were getting married. In the West, this manifested in rising divorce rates. But this pattern was not seen in East Asia. Men in East Asia were more likely to be unmarried than men in the West. Between 1970 and 1985, the number of divorces per thousand people doubled in Denmark and Norway and tripled in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In England and Wales, while there was only one divorce per fifty-two weddings in 1938, that number became one every 2.2 fifty years later; this trend accelerated in the 1960s. During the 1970s, Californian women visiting their doctors showed a marked decline in the desire for marriage and children. In all Western nations, the number of single-person households steadily rose. In the major metropolitan areas, half the population lived alone. Meanwhile, the "traditional"
nuclear family—a phrase first coined in 1924—was in decline. In Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and West Germany, only a minority of households consisted of two parents and their children by the 1980s, down from half or more than half in 1960. In Sweden, such a family unit fell from 37% to 25% in the same period; in fact, more than half of all children in Sweden in the mid-1980s were born to unmarried women. As women's labor participation rose, rumors that career-oriented women were unhappy and unfulfilled or that mothers regretted returning to work began to spread. Mothers-in-law and medical doctors began urging women to forgo their ambitions in order to have children early to avoid problems infertility later on. Popular media frequently exhorted working women—if implicitly—to quit their jobs. Media outlets frequently glamorized women who pursued both demanding careers and had children before it was too late for them to do so. However, as psychologist Jean Twenge pointed out, statistics concerning women's fertility decline as a function of age used at the time were misleading because they relied on French birth records between 1670 and 1830, "a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment." Nevertheless, the share of American adults who rejected traditional gender roles steadily rose during the 1970s and 1980s. Marriage became increasingly viewed as an option, rather than an obligation. Married men were noticeably less willing to disrupt the careers of their wives. In Italy, divorce was legalized in 1970 and confirmed by referendum in 1974. Abortion went through the same process in 1978 and 1981, respectively. Part of the reason why people increasingly married their socioeconomic and educational peers was economic in nature. Innovations that became commercially available in the late twentieth century such as the washing machine and frozen food reduced the amount of time people needed to spend on housework, which diminished the importance of domestic skills. Moreover, it was no longer possible for a couple with one spouse having no more than a high-school diploma to earn about the national average; on the other hand, couples both of whom had at least a bachelor's degree could expect to make a significant amount above the national average. People thus had a clear economic incentive to seek out a mate with at least as high a level of education in order to maximize their potential income. A societal outcome of this was that as household gender equality improved because women had more choices, income inequality widened. == In midlife ==