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Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown
PublicAffairs
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
288 pages ISBN: 1610393503 EAN: 9781610393508 Kindle: B00FD36G0W Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The America of the near future will look nothing like the
America of the recent past.
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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