Taylor uses data from various Pew Research Center's polls to analyze how the
USA is changing.
The USA in the 1960s:
The population is getting older, although not as much as in Japan and Europe, because immigration is keeping the median lower than in most of advanced countries. To me (an immigrant myself), immigration is the real protagonist here. Something very important had happened in the Sixties that was underestimated given the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the hippies and everything else that was going on. Between 1921 (when the USA enacted the "Emergency Quota Act" that restricted foreign immigration) and 1965 (when the USA enacted the "Immigration and Nationality Act" that reopened the doors to foreign immigration) the population of the USA had remained mostly white protestant of European origin. After 1965 the population mix of the USA began to change.
Taylor shows how moral values are vastly different between millennials and
previous generations but doesn't quite emphasize the most striking of his
data on immigrants. It is true that young white males have a much more liberal
view of the family than their parents and grandparents; but this is not true
of Asian-American immigrants.
Asian-Americans have the strongest family values of all: in 2010 marriage
was ranked as the most important thing in life by 54% of Asian-Americans
versus 34% of all US citizens. In fact, they are more likely to be married
than any other ethnic group, and their children are more likely to live
in a traditional family with children of any other ethnic group.
Bottom line: it is really the white population that is experiencing the biggest generational change, although the majority of those over 30 are still attached to old values. The book has dozens of intriguing statistics. It is only a bit annoying that the book keeps talking of the USA as "America". America is a continent, the USA one of its countries. Statements such as "A teenager has less chance of being raised by both biological parents in America than anywhere else in the world" are factually false. The place where this is true is the USA, not Brazil or Canada or Argentina (which are all located in America). Hopefully the Millennials will learn to say "USA" (and not "America") when they mean "USA". |