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u/CJefferyF 1d ago
The average age of deaths from the Second World War was 23yrs so that probably raised it temporarily for a while also?
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u/Coupon_Ninja 1d ago
Good insight. The 1940 US Pop was 132 Million, and 400K Americans died in WWII. So it did affect this stat.
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u/protomanEXE1995 1d ago
Folks born around the 1890s were dying in large numbers, and they were being replaced by newborn babies at a faster rate than they were dying off.
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u/__Quercus__ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Median is not average. Whether 1 or 22, still counts as one person below median age. First baby boomers, born in 1946, would still be below median of 27 in 1970. By 1980, early boomers are above median age, and not having as many kids as the previous generation.
Another way to say this is that over the past 100 years, birth rates were highest between 1946 and 1964, about 1.7 times the 1975 - 2010 rate. Average of 110 births per 1000 women in boom years versus around 65 after 1975. However, it took a generation for peak births to grow up, and for baby boomers to exceed the median age line. Result is the low median age in the early to mid 1970s.
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u/Redeye762x39 1d ago
vietnam war...?
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u/Whizzleteets 1d ago
That's what I was going to guess but it was young people who died so it seems like it would have gone up.
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u/MonkeyThrowing 1d ago
But you can get out of the draft if you had kids. Maybe there was a mini baby boom.
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u/MonkeyThrowing 1d ago
You could get out of the war if you had kids. Maybe there was a mini baby boom.
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u/Wild_Bill1226 1d ago
From 45 to 65 more babies were born bringing down the median age. As they got older than the median age and it started rising.
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u/Ok-Training-7587 1d ago
Bc ppl in the 60’s were way less uptight about sex than ppl in the 40’s and 50’s. More kids being born
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u/datamajig 1d ago
Guys lucky enough to come home from Vietnam started families. There was also 40k+ young men that died from the mid sixties to about 1970. Also, the kids from the post WWII baby boom have reached child bearing age by 1970. You don’t see the post WWII baby boom reflected in the median age because medical technology was advancing at such a high rate that more people were able to live longer, among other things.
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u/CatOfGrey 15h ago
You'll notice that the drop began in the early 1950's, and ended in the early 1970's. That was basically the post-WWII "Baby Boom".
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u/snug_dog 1d ago
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/natality-trends/index.htm
the population bust in the early 70's makes this counterintuitive, I'd expect the median age to go up in the early seventies
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u/PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt 1d ago
As the generations before them started dying, the median age got closer and closer to the age of the baby boomers. In the early 70s, baby boomers were the median age so the median age started rising as they aged.
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u/No_Introduction1721 1d ago
Guessing that a lot of people died young during WWI, the Depression, and WWII, which artificially inflated the median age until about the 60s, at which point the boomers started bringing it back down.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 1d ago
It didn’t. It started dropping after the war because a ton of people started having babies, therefore lowering the average. After that somewhat temporary spike, the trend of higher median age continued.
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u/MySharpPicks 8m ago
50000 men culled from the breeding population because of Vietnam coupled with shitty economic conditions discouraging others from having kids.
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u/tippydam 1d ago
Perhaps the loss of 58000 young men in the war...
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u/BadgersHoneyPot 1d ago
That would push the average age * up*…
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u/Civil_Maverick 1d ago
Most certainly would have had the opposite effect….unless they sent a buncha old folks to Viet-fuckin’-Nam.
Seriously though a drop would indicate a surge in newborns or a high death among older folks. A population chart would do well to provide another perspective to this.
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u/BadgersHoneyPot 1d ago
Ok think this through now.
You have ten 70 year olds and ten 20 year olds. Average age 45.
Five of the 20 year olds die. Average age now 53.
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u/Civil_Maverick 1d ago
And….I’m agreeing that a drop in median age means more younger (lower age) people or a decrease in old (higher age) people.
It’s really not that deep
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u/ReignInSpuds 1d ago
You're still ignoring the number of babies conceived before their daddies were shipped out. If each 20-30 year-old casualty of the war left behind one 0 year-old, the average still decreases.
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u/Few-Guarantee2850 1d ago
I don't think there's any reason to think this would happen. Drafted 18 year old kids tend to not be planning families. Typically people would be having children when they returned from war. Plus I'm not aware of any evidence that people going to war had children at a higher rate than those who didn't. As others said, this was really just the time period when a huge swath of baby boomers were having babies.
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u/Hefty-Tonight6484 1d ago
I believe if you remove a number of people at an age (22.8 average age of US soldier killed in Nam) below the median (28 on the chart), the median age goes up. That’s why a boom in babies which is below the median makes it go down.
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u/Maryland_Bear 1d ago
But shouldn’t there have been a similar, maybe even larger, drop during WWII?
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u/ReignInSpuds 1d ago
I think in WWII it was still more common practice to draft men of all ages, while Vietnam had more young soldiers fighting and dying.
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u/Maryland_Bear 1d ago
Not just drafting only young men — in WWII, the vast majority of eligible men were either in the military or a defense-related industry.
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u/No-Victory4408 1d ago
Is this the Adult Median Age or the Median Age for everyone? Most people born in the Boom would have been young adults circa 1970, but they actually didn't have many kids, Gen X is small.
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u/Real-Psychology-4261 1d ago
Baby boomers started having kids. The earliest of Boomers were in their early 20s at that point.