The Next America

Examines the vast differences in the economic, demographic, social and political values of the four current living generations, the millennials, gen Xers, baby boomers, and the silent generation.

Préface
The America of the baby boomers is going to be remade radically when the Millennials are the dominant generation because their values, expectations and experiences are markedly different. This book, backed by the comprehensive surveying of the Pew Research centre shows how a new America will unfold, what it will value and how totally unlike your grandfather's America it will be.

Auteur

Paul Taylor is the executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, and serves as the director of the center's Social & Demographic Trends project and director of the Pew Hispanic Center. From 1996 through 2003, he served as president and board chairman of the Alliance for Better Campaigns. Before that, he was a newspaper reporter for 25 years, the last 14 at "The Washington Post," where he covered national politics and served as a foreign correspondent. From 1992-1995, he was the Post's bureau chief in South Africa and reported on the historic transformation from apartheid to democracy. He also covered four U.S. presidential campaigns. Taylor is the author of "See How They Run" (Knopf, 1990) and co-author of "The Old News Versus the New News" (Twentieth Century Fund, 1992). He twice served as the visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, in 1989 and 1995. He graduated in 1970 with a bachelor's in American Studies from Yale University. Taylor has lectured at numerous colleges and frequently discusses Pew Research studies in print and broadcast media.

Texte du rabat

For the first time in its recent history, America faces the prospect of intergenerational conflict. The affluent baby boomers--self-indulgent, easy going, and the beneficiaries of the greatest welfare program in American history--are bankrupting the young, the Millennials. Young and old in America are poles apart and the breadth of today's chasm is unprecedented. By 2030, America's age pyramid--the relationship between the number of working Americans asked to support retirees--will take on a shape it's never been before. Is there a great Battle of the Ages looming on our horizon--one that pits a mostly white generation of older adults against a mostly non-white generation of younger ones? "Change Ahead" presents a surgical examination of the wide array of economic, demographic, social, and political data to illuminate the tectonic changes affecting the make-up of America's demographic today. There are four generations that comprise America's current demographic: Millennials are empowered by digital technology and slow to adulthood. Gen Xers are those savvy entrepreneurial loners, distrustful of institutions. Baby Boomers led the counter-cultural upheavals of the 1960s, but are now gloomy, and worried about retirement. And the silent generation can be counted on to be conservative and conformist, uneasy with the pace of change today. Drawing on trend data from the Pew Research Center's extensive archive of public opinion surveys, Paul Taylor explores how America's polarized political system must honor its obligations to the old without bankrupting the young, at how new family structures can mend holes in the public safety net that are sure to widen as the population grays, and whether the rising generations of conservative, white retirees and liberal, non-white workers will work in harmony as they figure out how to divvy up their respective shares of the American dream in an age of austerity.

Résumé
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 centre'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.