Paul Taylor - The Next America - Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

Overview

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.

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