hardship of the Depression, families simply stopped having children, and as a result, the generation born during that decade was markedly smaller than both the generation that preceded it and the generation that immediately followed it.
Year Total Births Births per 1,000
1910 2,777,000 30.1
1915 2,965,000 29.5
1920 2,950,000 27.7
1925 2,909,000 25.1
1930 2,618,000 21.3
1935 2,377,000 18.7
1940 2,559,000 19.4
1945 2,858,000 20.4
1950 3,632,000 24.1
Here is what the economist H. Scott Gordon once wrote about the particular benefits of being one of those people born in a small generation:
When he opens his eyes for the first time, it is in a spacious hospital, well-appointed to serve the wave that preceded him. The staff is generous with their time, since they have little to do while they ride out the brief period of calm until the next wave hits. When he comes to school age, the magnificent buildings are already there to receive him; the ample staff of teachers welcomes him with open arms. In high school, the basketball team is not as good as it was but there is no problem getting time on the gymnasium floor. The university is a delightful place; lots of room in the classes and residences, no crowding in the cafeteria, and the professors are solicitous. Then he hits the job market. The supply of new entrants is low, and the demand is high, because there is a large wave coming behind him providing a strong demand for the goods and services of his potential employers.
In New York City, the early 1930s cohort was so small that class sizes were at least half of what they had been twenty-five years earlier. The schools were new, built for the big generation that had come before, and the teachers had what in the Depression was considered a high-status job.
"The New York City public schools of the 1940s were considered the best schools in the country," says Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University who has written widely on the city's educational history. "There was this generation of educators in the thirties and forties who would have been in another time and place college professors. They were brilliant, but they couldn't get the jobs they wanted, and public teaching was what they did because it was security and it had a pension and you didn't get laid off."
The same dynamic benefited the members of that generation when they went off to college. Here is Ted Friedman, one of the top litigators in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Flom, he grew up poor, the child of struggling Jewish immigrants.
"My options were City College and the University of Michigan," Friedman said. City College was free, and Michigan—then, as now, one of the top universities in the United States—was $450 a year. "And the thing was, after the first year, you could get a scholarship if your grades were high," Friedman said. "So it was only the first year I had to pay that, if I did well." Friedman's first inclination was to stay in New York. "Well, I went to City College for one day, I didn't like it. I thought, This is going to be four more years of Bronx Science [the high school he had attended], and came home, packed my bags, and hitchhiked to Ann Arbor." He went on:
I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket from the summer. I was working the Catskills to make enough money to pay the four-hundred-fifty-dollar tuition, and I had some left over. Then there was this fancy restaurant in Ann Arbor where I got a job waiting tables. I also worked the night shift at River Rouge, the big Ford plant. That was real money. It wasn't so hard to get that job. The factories were looking for people. I had another job too, which paid me the best pay I ever had before I became a lawyer, which was working in construction. During the summer, in Ann Arbor, we built the Chrysler proving grounds. I worked there a few summers during law school. Those jobs were really high paying, probably because you worked so much overtime.
Think about this story for a moment. The first lesson is that Friedman was willing to work hard, take responsibility for himself, and put himself through school. But the second, perhaps more important lesson is that he happened to come along at a time in America when if you were willing to work hard, you could take responsibility for yourself and put yourself through