The generation that twirled the first plastic hula hoops and dressed up the first Barbie dolls, embraced the TV age, blissed out at Woodstock and protested the Vietnam War — the cohort that didn’t trust anyone over age 30 — now is contributing to the overall aging of America.

Boomers becoming octogenarians in 2026 include actor Henry Winkler and baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, singers Cher and Dolly Parton and presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The aging and shrinking youth of America

America’s population swelled with around 76 million births from 1946 to 1964, a spike magnified by couples reuniting after World War Two and enjoying postwar prosperity.

Boomers were better educated and richer than previous generations, and they helped grow a consumer-driven economy. In their youth, they pushed for social change through the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement and efforts to end the Vietnam War.

“We had rock ‘n’ roll. We were the first generation to get out and demonstrate in the streets. We were the first generation, that was, you know, a socially conscious generation,” said Diane West, a metro Atlanta resident who turns 80 in January. “Our parents played by the rules. We didn’t necessarily play by the rules, and there were lots of us.”

As they got older they became known as the “me” generation, a pejorative term coined by writer Tom Wolfe to reflect what some regarded as their self-absorption and consumerism.

“The thing about baby boomers is they’ve always had a spotlight on them, no matter what age they were,” Brookings demographer William Frey said. “They were a big generation, but they also did important things.”

By the end of this decade, all baby boomers will be 65 and older, and the number of people 80 and over will double in 20 years, Frey said.

The share of senior citizens in the U.S. population is projected to grow from 18.7% in 2025 to nearly 23% by 2050, while children under 18 decline from almost 21% to a projected 18.4%.

Without any immigration, the U.S. population will start shrinking in five years. That’s when deaths will surpass births, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office, which were revised in September to account for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Population growth comes from immigration as well as births outpacing deaths.

The aging of America is being compounded by longer lives due to better health care and lower birth rates.

The projected average U.S. life expectancy at birth rises from 78.9 years in 2025 to 82.2 years in 2055, according to the CBO. And since the Great Recession in 2008, when the fertility rate was 2.08, around the 2.1 rate needed for children to numerically replace their parents, it has been on a steady decline, hitting 1.6 in 2025.

Younger generations miss boomer milestones

Women are having fewer children because they are better educated, they’re delaying marriage to focus on careers and they’re having their first child at a later age. Unaffordable housing, poor access to child care and the growing expenses of child-rearing also add up to fewer kids.

University of New Hampshire senior demographer Kenneth Johnson estimates that the result has been 11.8 million fewer births, compared to what might have been had the fertility rate stayed at Great Recession levels.

“I was young when I had kids. I mean that’s what we did — we got out of college, we got married and we had babies,” said West, who has two daughters, a stepdaughter and six grandchildren. “My kids got married in their 30s, so it’s very different.”

A recent Census Bureau study showed that 21st century young adults in the U.S. haven’t been adulting like baby boomers did. In 1975, almost half of 25-to-34-year-olds had moved out of their parents’ home, landed jobs, gotten married and had kids. By the early 2020s, less than a quarter of U.S. adults had hit these milestones.

West, whose 21-year-old grandson lives with her, understands why: They lack the prospects her generation enjoyed. Her grandson, Paul Quirk, said it comes down to financial instability.

“They were able to buy a lot of things, a lot cheaper,” Quirk said.

All of her grandchildren are frustrated by the economy, West added.

“You have to get three roommates in order to afford a place,” she said. “When we got out of college, we had a job waiting for us. And now, people who have master’s degrees are going to work fast food while they look for a real job.”

Implications for the economy

The aging of America could constrain economic growth. With fewer workers paying taxes, Social Security and Medicare will be under more pressure. About 34 seniors have been supported by every 100 workers in 2025, but that ratio grows to 50 seniors per 100 working-age people in about 30 years, according to estimates released last year by the White House.

When West launched her career in employee benefits and retirement planning in 1973, each 100 workers supported 20 or fewer retirees, by some calculations.

Vice President JD Vance and Tesla CEO Elon Musk are among those pushing for an increase in fertility. Vance has suggested giving parents more voting power, according to their numbers of children, or following the example of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in giving low-interest loans to married parents and tax exemptions to women who have four children or more.

Frey said programs that incentivize fertility among U.S. women hardly ever work, so funding should support pre-kindergarten and paid family leave.

“I think the best you can do for people who do want to have kids is to make it easier and less expensive to have them and raise them,” he said. “Those things may not bring up the fertility rate as much as people would like, but at least the kids who are being born will have a better chance of succeeding.”

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Emilie Megnien in Atlanta contributed to this report.

We will get a new estimate of Q3 U.S. GDP growth today. The consensus among analysts is for a rise of 3.2% year-on-year. That’s pretty decent growth. No wonder then, that the S&P 500 ticked up another 0.88% yesterday, to come within half a percentage point of its all-time high, and futures this morning are marginally up too. Traders seem to be pretty happy about where the U.S. economy is going.

But some analysts are starting to worry about how much of that growth is concentrated in AI.

A recent note from Pantheon Macroeconomics said that private fixed investment—a measure of how much companies are spending—”is rising only due to AI-related spending.” Analyst Oliver Allen published a chart this morning showing that all other private fixed investment is actually in decline:

“Capex intentions remain depressed, suggesting investment outside of AI-linked sectors remains weak,” he told clients in a note seen by Fortune.

Deutsche Bank said much the same thing in a recent note discussing whether AI was a bubble. “Investment in AI-related sectors is critical to GDP growth [and the] U.S. would be close to recession this year if it weren’t for tech-related spending, as other spending has flatlined post-Covid,” analysts Adrian Cox and Stefan Abrudan wrote.

The scale of capital expenditure (capex) investment going into AI is gargantuan. Bank of America’s Justin Post and Nitin Bansal estimate that AI capex from just five “hyperscalers” (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle) will total $399 billion this year and rise to over $600 billion in the years to come.

Increasingly, that AI capex will likely be funded by debt. The big tech companies have such healthy cashflow and robust balance sheets that it’s easy for most of them to add debt without harming their bottom lines, BofA says.

That debt is already breaking records. “Net supply [of new debt] from AI-related issuers in the USD credit market has crossed $200 billion in 2025, more than doubling last year’s total,” Spencer Rogers and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs told clients recently. “30% of USD credit net supply this year is AI-related.” He expects that number to go higher next year.

BofA says the companies are chasing $1 trillion in incremental revenues over the next five years. About $500 billion of that from cloud services; $400 billion in extra digital advertising spending; and $200 billion from AI subscriptions from both consumers and businesses. 

“Historically (2021-24), each dollar of capex helped generate an average of $0.90 incremental revenue and $0.42 of incremental EBITDA in the following year,” they wrote.

Let’s hope they are right. Because according to Deutsche Bank, hyperscalers will spend a cumulative $4 trillion on AI data centers through 2030—more than the U.S. government’s moon-landing program in the 1960s: “10x [the] inflation-adjusted cost of Apollo programme with no guaranteed return.”

Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

• S&P 500 futures are up marginally this morning. The last session closed up 0.64%. 
• STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.18% in early trading. 
• The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was flat in early trading. 
• Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat. 
• China’s CSI 300 was up 0.2%. 
• The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.28%. 
• India’s NIFTY 50 was flat. 
• Bitcoin sunk to $87K.