For the record, cause most people don't know, the 'Baby Boom' in the US is from 1946 to 1964, that is a period where live births per 1000 per year in the US remained above 22 each year. Prior to that, we had a massive depression era drop off, pre-Depression the birthrate was always well above 22, so it's something of a fake boom, a return to near pre-depression levels isn't really a 'boom'. After that it trails off for all the reasons people normally say - contraceptives, cultural changes, etc... but most of those are actually minor effects with the big one being that 'per 1000', people live longer, so where peak breeding age people (age 20-34 for women) might have made up, say, 30% of the population, an life expectancy jump of 15 years might make them represent only 20% of the population. The birthrate has dropped (down to mid-teens) mostly because there are way more 70 year olds sitting around not having kids then there used to be. You just don't get the same numbers if you take a pool of 1000 women age 1-90 avg 45 as you do 1-90 avg age 30, and it's never going to be a flat line unless you've had a stable population for a century anyway. But, one might want to take note that the end of the boom, 1964, corresponds fairly closely to the period our birth rate had dropped off. All those people who weren't born during the pre-boom drop off weren't around to have kids as the pre-drop people born in the 1900-1925-ish period had stopped having them.

This kinda comes in as important because we usually define Gen X'ers as that group of people born for about 20 years after the baby boom ended. It's a mostly meaningless concept that came into existence pretty much because boomers are people who don't remember the wars or depression and people thought that was significant, so they decided to continue attributing significance to an almost entirely arbitrary delineation process. Very arbitrary in the states, where even with TV and radio having a homogenizing effect region and culture still played far more significant roles in people's thinking then the year they were born. That most people younger than me barely remember what a typewriter is or when phone had to actually be 'dialed' is not, really, that big a deal, considering those items hadn't really been around that long before, particularly in genuinely mass usage. Most of the stuff that people describe as specifically important to a generation usually revolves almost entirely around it's major impact being some demographic 3-6 years wide, not 20. I know virtually no one who describes themselves as Gen-X and very few of those can actually put a year cut off on it, and it usually won't match anyone else's, but it's primary accepted definition basically describes anyone currently in their early to mid 30's to early 50's, who of course have damn near nothing in common with each other that they don't have in common with non-Gen-X persons. I'm actually in Gen-X in some versions, especially in the ones that try to force 20 year epochs on these things.

Very damned stupid notion in the first place, 20 years for a generation, even in relatively 'olden times' most children's parent were more than 20 years older then them. Peak breeding age in women is about 20-34 in the US in the last century or so. That is why the eldest grandkid might be about forty years younger then grandma and the youngest might be 70 or 80 years younger. Very few of us don't have a first cousin once removed that is older than one of our first cousins... by the way, your first cousin's kids is not your 2nd cousin, I don't know why people think this, their kid is your first cousin once removed, you have first cousins X times removed who were alive when the pyramids were being built. Your first cousins kid and your kid are second cousins, because they share the same great-grandparent. We do this off most recent known common ancestor, and go off the lowest count in the relation ship, treating parents as 'zero'. If Bob Johnson was my great-great-great-grandpa and someone else's great-grandpa, we start off their's as closer, parent=0, grand=1, great=2, great-great=3, great-great=4, etc. That person and I are second cousins, going off his 2, mine is 4 and 4-2=2, we are second cousins, twice removed. Something of a tangent but I make a point of sharing that around. Probably more important is that guy who is my second cousin twice removed could easily be younger than me, especially if I were the eldest sons eldest sons eldest son etc and he was from the younger kids younger kids etc. Eldest child rather than son, except most people track off their surname or dad'd dad's dad etc. when looking at their genealogy.

End tangent. The simple fact of the matter is that while a lot of OWS persons are in their late teens through mid-20s and have parents who are "Gen X" quite a few have parents who were baby boomers, it isn't that weird to have a parent born in the mid-50's and be in your early 20's, anymore then being 18 and having a parent who is 38. If we assume, probably erroneously, that 90% of the OWS movement is 18-26, that means about 90% of their parents are going to be 36-66 and that's a pretty useless bracket to look at, considering that means many of those people's parents weren't to school with many of those other people's grandparents. I'm not quite sure what impact the alleged prior generation is supposed to have had on them. Add to that when we talk about 'shared experiences', like say, being a Nirvana fan, one generally ignores anything that isn't shared, and generally includes anyone who didn't actually share a fondness for Nirvana if it turns out they liked 2 or 3 other things that most of the others present did too. In a building analogy, if you've got bricks that are all about the same size, say 2-3.5 inches high, while ten or fifteen stacks up you may find a lot of bricks at the same height who are all 12 stacks high, but that would be a damn tricky thing to meaningful draw parallels off of and any generalizations you construct off that are likely to be as wobbly and shaky and dangerous as any house you construct out of bricks shaped that way.

So in summary, I think the points being made in the article are utter garbage with as much accuracy as astrology, and for the same reason. Astrology generally does loosely define some common personality Archetypes, they just have precious little to with the month you were born, and much of what the article says has some overtones of truth but the connections drawn from X to OWS are just as shaky. And yes I am aware Cracked is not a source on usually worries much about accuracy at. Whichever, if nothing else anyone reading this can at least say they now know what their second cousin is, so there's that.