Researchers and popular media use the early s as starting birth years and the mids as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from to As the first generation to grow up with the Internet , millennials have been described as the first global generation. Millennials, in the US, have been called the "Unluckiest Generation" as the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth and more recessions since entering the workforce than any other generation in history.
Members of this demographic cohort are known as millennials because the oldest became adults around the turn of the millennium. In August , an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe teenagers of the day, then aged 13β19 born β , who were at the time defined as different from Generation X. Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers , due to them often being the offspring of the Baby Boomers , the significant increase in birth rates from the early s to mids, and their generation's large size relative to that of Boomers.
Oxford Living Dictionaries describes a millennial as a person "born between the early s and the late s. Jonathan Rauch , senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Economist in that "generations are squishy concepts", but the to birth cohort is a "widely accepted" definition for millennials.
The Pew Research Center defines millennials as the people born from to , choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors", including the 11 September terrorist attacks , the invasion of Iraq , Great Recession , and Internet explosion. They acknowledge disagreements, complaints over date ranges, generation names, and the overgeneralized "personality" of each generation. They suggest that marketers and journalists use the different groupings to target their marketing to particular age groups.
However, they cite Pew's β definition to define millennials. The Brookings Institution defines the millennial generation as people born from to , [ 57 ] as does Gallup , [ 58 ] Federal Reserve Board , [ 59 ] and the American Psychological Association. Census publication in noted that millennials are "colloquially defined as the cohort born from to ", using this definition in a breakdown of Survey of Income and Program Participation SIPP data.
