 The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python"; in particular, 76 million Americans were born during this timeframe.By this definition and U.S. Census data, there are currently 71.6 million boomers in the United States as of 2019.In the 1960s and 1970s, as this relatively large number of young people entered their teens and young adulthood—the oldest turned 18 in 1964—they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort and the changes brought about by their size in numbers, such as the counterculture of the 1960s.