Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare

In this influential work, Richard A. Easterlin shows how the size of a generation–the number of persons born in a particular year–directly and indirectly affects the personal welfare of its members, the make-up and breakdown of the family, and the general well being of the economy. “[Easterlin] has made clear, I think unambiguously, that the baby-boom generation is economically underprivileged merely because of its size. And in showing this, he demonstrates that population size can be as restrictive as a factor as sex, race, or class on equality of opportunity in the U.S.”–Jeffrey Madrick, Business Week