[HostileTerritory]

Jonathan Pontell is a Los Angeles-based social analyst who identified and named Generation Jones.

You don't say.

Thank you, Mr. Pontell, for your valuable contribution to American society. I suppose it's a matter of time before someone new splits Generation Jones along the axis of 1959 and invents a media boomlet all for himself.

I was one of the rare Americans born during the Ford Presidency. Where's my book?

[Tribune7]

Whoa. We rule.

It's still a stupid name. Almost makes me want to go back to being called a Baby Boomer.

[PjhCPA]

Generation Jones is the large, heretofore lost, generation between the baby boomers and Generation X. Born in the years 1954 to 1965,

Being born in 1961, I prefer to be called a part of the "Reagan Generation." I voted for President Reagan in 1980 in the first election I could vote in.

[djreece]

This is interesting, but it does conflict with what I had read here on FR that Gen X / Gen Reagan women were solidly in the Bush camp throughout the runup to the election. I don't have time to look up the article right now though.

[NathanR]

"For the uninitiated, Generation Jones is the large, heretofore lost, generation between the baby boomers and Generation X. Born in the years 1954 to 1965."

No these are just the youngest Boomers, which (mostly) missed Viet Nam. the oldest of this cohort would have been 11 in 1965, when they started sending draftees to 'Nam. The draft was winding down or gone when they reached draft age.

[Ulysses]

"Jones" bump for later...

[Not A Snowbird]

Great. All this time I think I'm a baby boomer, now I find out I'm a Joneser? What the heck?

[x]

It's been clear for a long time that early and late "Boomers" had a lot of differences. The latter were sort of half-way between the early Boomers and the X-ers. If you were in high school after Watergate, the fall of Saigon, and the first oil crunch the world looked quite different than if you were the same age a decade or more earlier with Kennedy, Johnson, and the draft.

But "Generation Jones" doesn't add to the discussion. It looks more like the author's bid for personal fame (I half hope it sticks and he's forever afterwards know as "the idiot who thought up 'Generation Jones')."

Sometimes the connection between the postwar demographic bulge and today's political attitudes isn't always clear. Europeans refer to those born from about the middle forties to the early fifties "'68'ers" in reference to the protests of that year. It fits better in describing political attitudes common among those born right after the war than "Boomer."

If we're talking about those from the second half of the baby boom who tail off into generation X, I suggest that we just call them "those Seventies kids."

[NewLand]

I'm not a BabyBoomer? Hooray!

I never heard of this before...what great news!