Gen Z, Gen Y, baby boomers – a guide to the generations

As a new report says Generation Z are smarter and more prudent than Gen Y, here's a guide to all those complex generational labels. Do you know your Baby Boomers from your Millennials?

Generation Z

Okay, it is a rubbish label. You might have thought they'd come up with something better by now. Nonetheless, Gen Z are the group born since just before the start of the Millennium. Not Thatcher's children -- more New Labour's offspring.

Poor lambs, they are still in their teens and someone has already slapped a label on them. Post-Millennials, Gen Wii, iGeneration were all floated by USA Today back in 2012, but Gen Z seems to have stuck.

Too young to remember 9/11, they have grown up in a world in political and financial turmoil. As a result, they are keen to look after their money, and make the world a better place. A report by Sparks & Honey, a US advertising agency (it is invariably ad agencies which try to fix labels to people), describes this generation as the "first tribe of true digital natives" or "screenagers". But unlike the older Gen Y, they are smarter, safer, more mature and want to change the world. Their pin-up is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakastani education campaigner, who survived being shot by the Taliban, and who became the world's youngest ever Nobel Prize recipient.

They are -- to their cynical Gen X parents -- almost nauseatingly worthy, keen to volunteer and aware that an education is to be treasured. Sparks & Honey says 60 per cent of them want to have an impact on the world, compared with 39 per cent of Millennials.

Generation Y

Also known as Millennials, born between about 1980 and 2000.

Born between the advent of the Walkman and the founding of Google, the members of Gen Y are unsurprisingly shaped by technology. Some have made fortunes from it. A few, like this man, have already become billionaires.

The phrase Generation Y was first used in a 1993 Ad Age article, while Millennials was coined by sociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss.As well as being comfortable sharing their entire life online, this is a selfish, self-regarding generation. "Let me take a Selfie," is their catchphrase.

Maybe it is not surprising -- this is a group who were brought up and pampered by their Gen X parents, who soothed them to sleep with Baby Einstein tapes.

Generation X

The man credited for christening this generation with such a deeply dull label is Robert Capa, the war photographer. But, confusingly, he was referring to young adults growing up in the early 1950s. So, in fact, Capa's bunch of kids were born before the War – which is not what we now mean by Gen X.

What we now mean by Generation X is this bunch of six impossibly well-groomed young adults:

Gen X are those born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. The nickname stuck thanks to the novel by Douglas Copeland: 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture', which was about Americans hitting adulthood in the late 1980s.

This generation has been characterised as being saddled with permanent cynicism. Too young to have fought in any major war, old enough to have enjoyed a free education – they have spent too much of their adulthood sitting around in coffee shops trying to set the world to rights. And failing.

Self-help books line their shelves and and they are burdened with an almost permanent state of anxiety -- social, financial, sexual.

But this is a large generation. And there are many subcultures and eras within it.

Lads

A subculture of Generation X, though laddism was more of a philosophy than a demographic grouping. It was a mesh of Madchester, the detoxification of football, the relaxation of late-night licensing, the rise of ecstasy and low-cost flights to stag-weekend locations in Europe. It peaked in England during the summer of 1996 and involved a brief and inexplicable hero-worshipping of Paul Gascoigne and the remorseless chanting of Underworld's 'Born Slippy NUXX' lyrics: lager, lager, lager.

Lads were often the feckless boyfriends of Bridget Joneses.

Sloane Rangers

An earlier subculture of Generation X which came to prominence in the early 1980s in Britain, particularly in the postcodes of SW10, SW3 and SW1, where you will find Sloane Square, their favoured stamping ground.

The Sloane pin-up was Lady Diana Spencer, Hunter wellies and all.

The look was an Alice band and Peter Pan collar for the girls, preferably twinned with some pearls and a tweed skirt. The boys wore their father's cast-off Savile Row suits, and tweed plus-fours at weekend shooting parties. They were captured perfectly in Peter York and Anne Barr's 'Sloane Ranger' handbook, published in 1982. Crucially, Sloanes were more than just a fashion brigade. They were a social class: not necessarily moneyed, they were the junior cousins of aristocrats and desperate to fit in. Sloanes, in many ways, were the last young adults to cling to the attitudes of the 1950s. As the Sloane Ranger Handbook said on the cover: "You know the rules, but it’s always nice to be sure.”

Yuppies

Related, but different to Sloanes. Yuppies stood for Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals. No one can quite agree which American journalist in the early 1980s who invented the term.

Unlike Sloanes, they were firmly rooted to this particular period. In Britain they swaggered their stuff and flashed their cash between Maggie Thatcher entering Downing Street in her pussy bow in 1979 and Black Monday in 1987, an eight-year period of booming share prices, right-to-buy, red braces, and a brick-sized carphones (as we called them back then).

Yuppies were not just City boys swigging 'shampoo' in wine bars, they were the children of the original baby boomers and not afraid to make money fast. Graft was not required. Ostentatious and unembarrassed displays of wealth were.

Baby Boomers

This was the original 'generation'. And it was a useful label because, initially, it described those born in the immediate years after World War II, when there was – thanks to soldiers returning home – a significant spike in births, both in America and in Britain. Baby Boomers, as a phrase, was first used in 1970, in a Washington Post article.

But the phrase is now used to describe the cohort of babies born from the end of the War all the way up to the early 1960s. These are the men and women who tuned in, got high, dropped out, dodged the draft, swung in the Sixties and became hippies in the Seventies. Some, like Bill clinton, made it to the White House.

Never has a generation had it so good, as Harold Macmillan said presciently about their parents in the 1950s. Baby boomers in Britain were the first to be born in a free NHS hospital, who enjoyed cradle to the grave welfare.

Idealistic and uncynical, this was the generation that fought the cold war and smashed down the Berlin War. But just as many sold out the moment they were able to buy a house and a car. They were the first generation able to go abroad not to fight a war -- but to sit on a beach. Many have already retired on generous, copper-bottomed final salary pensions.