Let’s look at the Baby Boomer generation — a large generation born in the 18 years following the end of World War 2, when the birth rate shot up to 3.5 children per woman. The medium Baby Boomer was born in the mid-50s, which means that they entered university – if they went to university…
Articles by Simon Kuestenmacher
Simon Kuestenmacher is one of Australia’s leading demographers, co-founder of The Demographics Group, a regular media commentator, a columnist for the Australian and one of the world’s Top 50 Influencers in Data Science.
www.SimonKuestenmacher.com
Covid taught us how difficult it is to make predictions about the future. But I like a challenge, so I’m going to make 22 predictions for 2022. Here they go: Millennials will continue to move out of apartments and leave their hipster neighbourhoods to purchase family-sized houses as they reach the family formation stage of…
What would you do if you were tasked with spreading the 25.7 million people in Australia across the continent? In how many cities would you place them? How many regional settlements would you build? Where would you build wheat towns, where would you build cotton towns, and where would the dairy towns be? What kind…
We can learn a lot about the Australian people simply by understanding how we spend our money. There used to be a wonderful tool that we could look to — Household Expenditure Survey (HES) asked 10,000 households extremely detailed questions about how they use their money. This survey is only run every 5-7 years and…
Our journey throughout generations is leading us to Gen Y, to the Millennials now — they are born between 1982 and 1999. They are the children of the Baby Boomers and grew up in the 90s and early 2000s; their parents sheltered them which led to the criticism that they are a mollycoddled generation. Millennials…
When Joseph and Mary were summoned to travel to Bethlehem to be counted for the Census 2000 years ago, they had to travel approximately 4 to 5 days and well over 1000 km in order to be counted. So in Australia, we should be feeling blessed, so to speak, that our friends at the ABS…
How has our retail behaviour changed by Covid and the lockdowns? In this article I’ll look back to the start of the pandemic when the first retail data came out in May 2020 to see what impact that the pandemic might have had from February to March and see how lockdowns actually change Australians’ behavior….
Recently the National Skills Commission published a really interesting data set talking about the five-year jobs forecast, this is a very big undertaking. And it helps us understand the future of our economy. So, what does a job forecast actually tell us? It tells us that over the next five years we will be adding…
With all the lockdowns happening in Australia, it is very hard to keep a positive, optimistic, future-focused perspective. Of course we need to remember that compared to all other areas of the globe we are managing pandemics extremely well. Oceania has 35 COVID deaths per 1 million residents. This compares to around 15,000 COVID deaths…
Recently we saw some fantastic looking employment figures published about the state of the Australian economy. We have a record-high 13.2 million people employed — that translates into a laughably low unemployment rate of 4.6%. Average wages for full-time employed Australians went up to record highs, the highest ever recorded numbers. This must all be…