"How the values, uphill optimism of the Millennials compare to older generations" PBS NewsHour 3/19/2014
Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, there’s the so-called silent generation, the boomers, Generation X, and most recently the millennials. Each has left, and is leaving, an imprint unique to their times.
But now we know more about the ways the youngest adults differ from and clash with their parents and grandparents. That’s the focus of the new book “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown” by Paul Taylor, the executive vice president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
I talked with him recently.
Paul Taylor, it’s great to have you back on the program.
PAUL TAYLOR, Pew Research Center: What a pleasure. What a pleasure.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So let’s talk about this. The looming showdown, what do you mean by that? And, as you talk, I want our audience to look at how we break down those age groups just to remind everybody.
But what do you mean by looming generational showdown?
PAUL TAYLOR: Well, there is a book about demographic change and its generational equity.
The country has gone through two massive demographic changes simultaneously. We’re becoming a majority non-white nation. In 1960, we were 85 percent white. By 2060, we will be 42 percent white. At the same time, we’re going gray; 10,000 baby boomers a day, today, turned 65. Another 10,000 tomorrow will turn 65. This continues every single day until 2030, at which point we have doubled the number of people on Social Security and Medicare and those systems don’t work anymore.
So what this book does is look at those changes and it looks at the potential generational conflicts they set up, because young and old today, because of these changes, don’t look alike, they don’t think alike and they don’t vote alike. And we are going to have to figure out how to rebalance our social safety net to make it work in the 21st century with a lot of political differences between young and old.
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