Death all around

[drdoug]

With David Bowie, Victoria Wood, Prince and many others, there's a lot of it around. Some argue George R. R. Martin is scripting 2016; others point to more prosaic factors, like it being about the time you'd expect Baby Boomers who came to fame in the explosion of celebrity in the 60s to die off. (Although that doesn't work for Victoria Wood or

Comments

[steer]

Actually, I think that BBC article misses out a lot of things. There's a good reason to think that our generation (by which I mean people born 10 years either side of us) will have at least one more order of magnitude of celebrities they care off and maybe a couple of orders of magnitude more they know about

[drdoug]

Interesting stuff, ta. I'm always interested in this sort of stuff, though.

One effect I suspect is smaller than I imagined is the actual size of the Baby Boomer population bulge. From memory, the Baby Boomer peak is at about 70 now, and the Gen-X peak is around 50, but the difference from peak to trough is less than a percentage-point of the total population on a pyramid. So it's probably not so much that the raw numbers make most of the difference, and much more the cohort effect of changes in celebrity patterns that you talk about.

Except thinking about it just now, maybe the differences are bigger if you integrate under the pyramid. Hmm, but what about people on the trough? No time to actually do this, alas.

[thekumquat]

I do wonder if there will be as many nationally-famous let alone Western-culturally-famous celebs in future, with the enormous choice of music stations, TV channels - and even the idea of stations and channels is practically obsolete with people now getting recs for individual bands/songs/videos and then linking from there