>>513905282
Strauss and Howe, the authors of "The Fourth Turning" who coined the name "Millennials, found that, across history, "Nomad Generations" like Gen X grew up in the shadow of their Prophet forebears (recently the Boomers) but then aged into the wise elders who led the Fourth Turning in the right direction when the new Civic Generation (Millennials or GI/WW2 Generation) demanded fundamental change.
And the Boomers would be nowhere near as wealthy, collectively, as they are in our timeline now, though they'd be taken care of.
The Alphas being born today would be far greater in number and the population would be much whiter, as Millennials and then Zoomers would be having many children due to the optimistic attitude across the country and the world.
Strauss and Howe argued that, during the American Civil War, the older Prophet generation, equivalent to today's Boomers, allowed their worst instincts to get the best of them and so they jumped the gun and the Fourth Turning began a decade too early, when their children, the would-have-been new Civic generation, were mostly just kids and the oldest were about 18, compared to the GI generation whose oldest members at the beginning of World War 2 were pushing 40. As a result of the Prophet generation of the Civil War Era giving in to their nastiest tendencies, the Fourth Turning did not produce a strong system of government that led to widespread prosperity, and instead the youth of the Civil War grew up broken, disillusioned, many of them addicted to opiates like Laudanum, and unable to produce anything better than the "Gilded Age" where the robber barons ruled the land and most people just toiled their lives away.
The same thing has happened again in our timeline. The Prophets (Boomers) ate their children like Saturn did in the myth, and now we are doomed to some 80 to 90 years of rapacious exploitation by our elites before another window of opportunity opens up for us to build a better system during the