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A baby boomer is someone who was born during the period of increased birth rates when economic prosperity rose in many countries following World War II. In the United States, the term is iconic and more properly capitalized as Baby Boomers and commonly applied to people with birth years from the span 1946 to 1964, which may comprise more than one generation. The Baby Boom is the iconic term widely used to refer to the American population and culture in particular, as post WW II demographics abroad did not mirror the sustained growth in American families over the same interval. Baby boomers also had the highest median household incomes in the United States.
In his book, Boomer Nation, Steve Gillon breaks this population into two groups: Boomers, born between 1945 and 1957; and Shadow Boomers born between 1958 and 1963. In some cases the term Shadow Boomer is incorrectly applied to the children of the Baby Boomers. However this group is more accurately referred to as Echo Boomers.
A large part of this was an after effect of World War II where the bombed out cities and fractured economies required goods and services in unprecendented peacetime amounts, and the Arsenal of Democracy switched gears and started cranking out goods and materials for export, as America supplied the "free world" with goods to rebuild their own economies. This led to an unprecedented bubble of vigorous economic growth that didn't slow down until 1958, and the G.I. Bill sent enabled record numbers of individuals to attend college and obtain, perhaps in most cases, the first college degree in their extended families. Levittown showed the way to flee the cities into the outlying suburbs which municipalities also grew at astonishing and unprecedented rates. The only contemporary example that might be somewhat similar is the ongoing rebuilding of New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast in general. So the Baby Boomers grew up in a new world quasi-dominated by American Military might, where the bad guys were known to be socialists and communists, during a cold war where researchers lead to today's computer driven world—which if glimpsed then would have been scoffed at as poor science fiction. Moreover, the generation matured for the most part both off the farm and outside of urban crowding when every year brought new wonders, marvelous gadgets and household appliances, and unemployment was virtually nil—provided your family was Caucasian and willing to work.
There are early boomers that the generation is identified by, and late boomers who did not experience the 1960s and were not subject to the military draft. Nonetheless, demographic popularizers have referred to them as a generation for the cultural factors they shared went far deeper than the triviality of a foreign conflict, more people were killed on the nations streets and by-ways in any single year of the conflict, than were lost to enemy action.
Baby boomers presently make up the lion's share of the political, cultural, industrial and academic leadership class in the United States. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, born within sixty days of each other in mid-1946, are the first and second Baby Boomer presidents, and their careers in office illustrate the wide, often diverging spectrum of values and attitudes espoused by this largest American generational group to date.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, include those conceived by soldiers on leave during the war, putting the generation's birth years at 1943 to 1960. Howe and Strauss argue that persons born between 1961 and 1964 have political and cultural patterns very different from those born between 1955 and 1960 and fit into what those writers term the Thirteenth Generation or Generation X (also known as the Cold War generation) born between 1961 and 1981. As the influence of Strauss and Howe has grown, a smaller number of people still accept Baby Boomers as including those born after 1961, although there are some who put the dates at 1946 to 1963 because of the number of significant "Gen-X" figures born in 1964. There were over 79 million babies born during that generation.
It can be argued that the defining event of early baby boomers was the Vietnam War and the protest over the draft, but it would be certainly correct to say it was the generation of The Beatles, The Motown Sound, and Hippies. Conscription in the United States ended in 1973 so anyone born after 1955 was not subject. This argues for a ten year range 1946 to 1955 and this would fit the thirtysomething demographic covered by the TV show of the same name. This means that those born in the ten years 1956 to 1965 would be Generation X in the late 1980s and would be twenty something as a response. On the other hand, if the gross number of births were the indicator, there would no reason for 1964 to be the ending year as the number of births did not decline in 1965. The choice of 1964 as the end date may not have been by a demographer but by more popular writers and the source of the 1964 year has not been pinned down yet. The entire controversy over naming and dating between the boomer and the Gen X cohorts could be explained by noting that the boomer years of 1946-64 is too long for a cultural generation yet may still mark a period of increased births while the cultural disaffinities of those born 1957 and after (thereby missing the draft and being too young to be part of the 1960s) could be captured by the Gen X of Douglas Coupland, the term "X" has itself been transformed to cover a later cohort.

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