What’s the best year to be born?

My father was born in 1949, but just at the very start of it, so close to ’48. It seems to have mostly worked for him, despite a very inasuspicious start (10th of 11 kids in a poor rural town, very poor family, father worked as a sheep herder in the mountains, they longed for summer so they could sleep outside because the tiny house was so crowded otherwise, etc.) It’s true that his favorite brother died in Vietnam, and that wasn’t so great, and he sometimes feels bad because none of his kids go to church, like he wanted, but otherwise things have mostly worked out for him. (The cardiovascular disease that would doom his parents was easier because of a better lifestyle and better medicine, so he’s mostly weathered that, and the miricles of knee replacements mean he still walks around and even hikes a bit, though not very fast.) So, that was probably a pretty reasonable time for a white guy in much of the US, too. Maybe different for others.

For the US I’d say 1965-1970. You had a lot of the economic advantages of the Boomers but without the social repression. You could have whatever kind of sex you wanted. You could afford to spend your 20s bumming around the music or other art scene in a big city and then still build a career and, if you really wanted to, buy a house.

I can’t speak from personal experience as I am a straight white man, but I think you play down the extent to which this argument depends on being a member of my category. My mother was born in 1950, almost your ideal date. She was one of very few women who went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, and she recounts the utter normalisation of extreme misogyny she experienced there, in ways that would be totally bizarre and unacceptable today. In the 1980s it was still normal for shops to say “no coloureds” or “no West Indians”; in the 1990s when I was at school it was still standard to use “gay” as an insult, and to beat up kids who presented as gay. Physical attacks and social opprobrium suffered by gay people remained fierce for decades after 1967. Discrimination is still bad against all of those categories, but I think it’s clear that it was much worse any time before the present. If I were behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which category I would fall into, I would choose to be born as recently as possible. (And if I also didn’t know which country in the world I’d be born into, which I know is not your original question, then there is no question at all that I’d choose as recent as possible, if only to minimize my risk of dying before age 5.)

As late as the 1980’s police soliciting gay sex and then beating the unfortunate supplier was still widely feared in both Australia and Aotearoa. This was still prosecuted in court and even today the police are reluctant to talk about how often it actually happened. So if you were gay, better to be born after 1970.

If you’re a woman with political ambitions in Australia I’d argue that being born after 2000 is preferable. Similar women in the US might want to hold off a bit longer. I’m not convinced that Aotearoa or Finland are great candidates for “you can do it” messaging to women even now.

If you’re first nations Australian 1948 is far too late, 1748 is more like it. Arguably for Maori 1970-1980 is when things start to turn up – Te Kupu was born about 1970 and was part of a wave of people who benefited from Nga Tamatoa and other post-Waitangi Tribunal activists and have participated in a Maori renaissance.

The flip side, obviously, it’s that it was much better to grow up with the threat of nuclear annihilation than the certaintly of climat catastrophe, so dates between ~1950 and 1990 are to be preferred on that front. Albeit ecological grief is common among the sane members even of those currently over-60… so maybe you’re right that 1948 is the best year.

1954: my year. I say this as an American Jew. Jews were obtaining the privileges of whiteness as I grew up. I was young enough to take full advantage of them, but old enough to remember that things were once different.

I’ve read the OP, but for lack of time right now, not most of the comments.

In the U.S., the year 1948 would have been a much better year to be born, for some (though not all) categories of people, than 1957, which is when I was born and which also was the statistical peak year of the so-called Baby Boom. If you’re a white male born in 1948 and graduating from college (if you go to college) around 1970, you do have to contend w/ the draft (I forget exactly when the academic deferments were tightened but for a while they were easily available I think). Other than the draft, which many people avoided in one way or another, 1970 is a good year to get out of college. If you want an academic career, such jobs would still be fairly plentiful though not quite as plentiful as in the boom years of the ’60s, and if you spent 5 or 6 years in grad school you’d still be reasonably well positioned in the academic job market.

By contrast, ten years later the situation had changed fairly dramatically. The academic job market had contracted severely. Also, getting into an “elite” law school (or grad school) was considerably less easy than it had been ten years before. So for a white male in the U.S. w/ certain sorts of career aspirations, 1948 was a significantly better year to be born than 1957.

As a gay man born in the 80s, the claim that it would have been better to be born as a gay man in 1946, rather than 1996 or, say, 2006, is bizarre. Even at my late-ish date I feel like I would have been better off born yet later, thereby dodging some of the utterly normalized cruelty that fucked me up as an adolescent in the 90s and early 00s. But a gay man born in 1946 would have faced much more extreme social marginalization leading into the mass death of HIV/AIDS in his middle age.

Regarding discrimination, I think there’s still so much to do, that being born at any future date is going to be preferable (e.g. structural racism and gender imbalances).

That is, if we make it through the climate crisis somehow.

“If they want, they can go to university, and if they do so it will be free and they will get a student grant from the government”

The first part wasn’t true in Australia until after 2000, when places were uncapped. Policy has varied a bit since then, but it’s pretty much true that if you want to go you can find a way. In the 1960s, getting in to uni depended on a make-or-break examination. Even completing high school was for minority, at least for working class kids,

The second part was true from early 1970s to late 1980s, which was great for those who went (including me). But youth unemployment hit 20 per cent in those years.

Life is too short to rebut this point by point, so I’ll just say this is a terrible post—ahistorical about the course of racism, sexism, and homophobia; unempathetic to people who suffered those things; and unduly pessimistic about the future (which is grim in a lot of ways but very positive in others; eg, highest labor force participation ever in the US for women and Blacks is right now; the kids are OK; we’re making huge strides on carbon even if too late; essentially every human alive has access to more knowledge than the Librarian of Congress 40 years ago; etc.)

Someone born in 1948 … They turn 15 … and hit 20 … They hit 60 …

What effect does being born in 1948 (as opposed to some other comparison year) have on a person’s likelihood of living to reach 15, or 20, or 60? Is this something to be factored in as a consideration? Why, or why not?

I was born in 1952 in the USA. Straight White Male. Just late enough that college deferment got me through to nearly the end of the draft ( I think a few percent of my cohort was drafted, but with US direct military involvement in Vietnam rapidly winding down, I was pretty safe). So early ’50s were OK for college-going males.

A lot depends on one’s particular talents and interests, and whether they intersect with when they are in high demand. I hit mine, early supercomputing at just the right time. Had I been fifteen years later my particular talents wouldn’t have been useful for building much of a career.

Even with recent climate disasters, our chances of avoiding truly catastrophic outcomes look a lot better today than they did 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, BAU projections implied warming of 4 degrees or even more, which would indeed have been catastrophic. Now we are looking at 2.5 degrees on the same basis (no change in existing policy), and less if net zero pledges (for which policy changes are needed) are metl https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2021/scenario-trajectories-and-temperature-outcomes.

That will still have lots of bad outcomes: fires, sea level rise, species extinctions etc. But our 1948 person would have been old enough to experience the Great Smog of London, suffer brain damage from lead in paint and petrol, see forests lost to acid rain and more.

Being trans makes this harder to answer even than for a gay man, but let’s say 1998. That would make me 16 in 2014 – the “trans tipping point” – and give me the best chance to go on blockers before the backlash started to shut that down. (Not that puberty blockers are a great deal of use at 16 but that’s what the NHS used to offer before they gave up completely.) Granted the rest of the situation isn’t great but, priorities.

Alan White @30:

“… history must attest to a very significant portion of humankind that would have been better off not being born at all.”

Wouldn’t history have a problem with the relation of reference and alternative worlds in determining the validity of its attesting? In a case where an individual was not (or has not yet been) born at all, who or what would history be referring to, and how would it determine the referential identity between that entity and the supposedly corresponding living individual, or some aspect of it? And it sounds like an empirical question, but only one possibility can be actual.

Of course that’s a problem for the OP question as well. One can imagine conversations like the following: A: I’m planning to jump in next week! B: Just try not to get born in Russia! That would be a case of ‘better luck next time!’. Who or what exactly is the question directed to? We’re considering different answers for different categories of people, so is it an objective matter, or do we assume a particular person’s interests and abilities, etc.? My present self might like to have been able to check out the coffee houses in 1930s Vienna. But is the question for my present self to answer?

What an absurdly pointless exercise, but quite revealing.

For the US I’d say 1965-1970. You had a lot of the economic advantages of the Boomers but without the social repression. You could have whatever kind of sex you wanted.

Provided you were able to keep out worries of slow death in your blooming years.

Oh, and I don’t know exactly when the English medical establishment started to admit adhd was real and diagnose it, but it was certainly after the 1980s and extremely relevant to my interests.

For that matter, Section 28 (forbidding the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and interpreted by most as a reason to ignore homophobic bullying) wasn’t repealed until 2003. So 1998 is continuing to look like a good option

“an absurdly pointless exercise” … or a bit of fun.

Maybe, for some people, pointing out the absurdity of such exercises is how they have fun.

Born in the USA. White male. 1944. Best year to have been born: us’ns got to have the 60’s! ( “West is the best, Get there & we’ll do the rest” Doors.) And yeah the music we watched aborning was the best too.

A fun fact that came to my mind: In France, all kinds of contraceptives were formally banned until 1967 (which helps explain to a considerable extent why May 1968 was such an eruption in France), so actually the 1960s were not necessarily such a great time to be an adolescent. Annie Ernaux (nobel prize for literature 2022) writes about things like that a lot; there really are things in life that matter a lot to the well-being of most people and that are not measured by economic indicators. I’m also impressed by Simone de Beauvoir’s account of the French early post war period. It must have been hellish, considering the Indochina and Algeria wars, the authoritarianism (Beauvoir more than once uses the f-word), the police brutality, and the desperation of the political left. The US had McCarthyism and the Vietnam war, the UK was also involved in mutliple colonial wars, Germany (West) under Adenauer was full of old Nazis in influential positions and refused to even talk about what had happened a few years past.

People often lionize the counter culture and revolutions of the late 1960s to explain their golden age nostalgia. I wasn’t around but I totally understand the appeal. But it’s really an ambivalent argument. Those protests and little revolutions happened because
young people were so unhappy, they felt so constricted and hopeless, finally they had had enough and erupted in protest (both in France and Germany, even just months beforehand, political observers didn’t see the protest movements coming; and btw those movements did not even remotely represent a majority of even the young generation). And while they totally failed to revolutionize the economic system, their protests did result in major social change, including in the essential but not so easily measurable realm of sexual relations.

So this generations grew up in shitty circumstances (not to overlook the fact that food scarcity was still a common experience in most of Europe in the 1950s) but they did experience significant improvement, and some of them also had the exhilarating experience of collective political action leading to actual change. I understand to some extent the nostalgia. But that doesn’t mean I would like to live in those shitty times.

If the key to a good life is the experience of rapid improvement, the post war generation was really “lucky”. They got to start from a very low baseline, after a horrible war. Things were almost certain to get better, they could hardly have gotten worse. I don’t really think this is a useful way of defining the good life.

I just noticed this now, the point in my last paragraph is very similar to the one in the last paragraph of TM @45 .

… at least for the UK and for the last 100 years …

With that limitation, being born in 1948 does give you a chance of being the King, but only being born in 1926 gives you a chance of being the Queen.

Speaking of stagflation, a large part of the “flation” thing is that workers had higer bargaining power, so they could ask for higer wages, which however partially turned into inflation.
So the “solution” to stagflation was basically to screw workers, something that we should take in account since most people are workers.

Then, when we speak of employment levels, modern day overall employment levels are pushed up by the fact that there are many more women in the workforce, but in the 70s women often still expected to be housewives (in the 70s many women of working age would have been born way before 1948). This is a double edged sword because on the one hand it is better to have more women in the workforce, but on the other it means that unemployment among those who are in the workforce is higer now relative to what the numbers about working population show. This also partially explains why workers had more bargaining power even if apparently unemployment was higer, though probably the main reason was stronger unions and a more pro-worker government policy.

Finally there is the different level of capital accumulation: most wealth is paper wealth but WW2 destroyed paper wealth too, and the higer and rising inflation destroyed savings and helped debtors. This meant that it was much easier to buy an house through working that it is today, as the price of housing relative to average income was much lower, and the same happened for all forms of wealth.

This caused probably more social mobility and created the feeling that it was easier to go up in the social ladder (because at the time it was), so it wasn’t just a psychological factor of coming from a poorer society, though this was true too: my mother, born 1949, did still see in her childhood, in a rural part of italy, her aunt go down to the river to fetch water and taking it uphill with a bowl on her head (they didn’t have electricity either, and they weren’t particularly poor).

In this respect, as is often the case, the US seems an outlier

Or an outrider.