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.
