The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1610396197
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use.
Today’s Millennials—well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings—are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they’d hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future.
Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40—both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow’s world, yesterday’s math will not add up.
Drawing on Pew Research Center’s extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we’re headed—toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.
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2011. By the time the youngest cross that threshold in 2030, America’s age pyramid will take on a shape it has never had before. About 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 or older, up from 1 in 7 now. The number of retirees on Social Security and Medicare will rise to about 80 million by 2030, roughly double the figure in 2000. Among them, the fastest growing cohort will be the “old-old.” The number of seniors ages 85 and older is expected to more than triple between now and 2050, to 19 million. Fewer
country of origin. However, return migration rates are estimated to be lower for immigrants from Asia than for other immigrants, and naturalization rates—that is, the share of eligible immigrants who become US citizens—are higher.) Figure 6.6 Who’s a “Tiger Mom”? Note: For the bottom bar, respondents were asked about parents from their country of origin group (Chinese-American parents, Korean-American parents, etc.). Those who did not provide a country of origin were asked about
as likely as Boomers to say they have become less active in a cause after reading what their friends said about it on social networking sites. As more and more people become content creators, it is increasingly common for Millennials to assume that when they discover something, they will share it with their broad network. This is part of the ongoing process of building and maintaining a vibrant social network; reciprocal sharing is the way Millennials build their social capital and reputations.
through.” As for the concern that only the wealthy will have access to such technologies, he noted with a dismissive shrug that people not too long ago said the same about cell phones.7 If the public policy questions raised by radical life extension are dizzying, the social and ethical questions are even more complex. Would it change the way we view marriage and children? Would it alter our sense of what it means to be human? Leon Kass, who chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics under
channeling the apocalyptic visions conjured up two centuries earlier by British scholar Thomas Malthus, called for a wide range of population control measures to mitigate the looming disasters of overpopulation. His book, like Vogel’s, became an international bestseller. How times change. Today’s demographic doomsday scenarios tend to revolve around too few, not too many. Yes, there are still “explosionists” concerned that an overpopulated planet will deplete the earth’s resources, but they now
