The Aftermath
The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America
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- ¥850
発行者による作品情報
“Philip Bump helps us understand that no matter the troubles of our days, the future of this nation rests with what we do now. And that means all of us—not just Baby Boomers.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, Princeton University
A popular Washington Post columnist takes a deep dive into what the end of the baby boom means for American politics and economics.
Philip Bump, a reporter as adept with a graph as with a paragraph, is popular for his ability to distill vast amounts of data into accessible stories. THE AFTERMATH is a sweeping assessment of how the baby boom created modern America, and where power, wealth, and politics will shift as the boom ends. How much longer than we'd expected will Boomers control wealth? Will millennials get shortchanged for jobs and capital as Gen Z rises? What kind of pressure will Boomers exert on the health care system? How do generations and parties overlap? When will regional identity trump age or ethnic or racial identity? Who will the future GOP voter be, and how does that affect Democratic strategies? What does the Census get right, and terribly wrong? The questions are myriad, and Bump is here to fight speculation with fact
Writing with a light hand and deft humor, Bump helps us navigate the flood of data in which our sense of the country now drowns. He fits numbers into a narrative about who we are (including what "we" really means), how we vote, where we live, what we buy—and what predictions we can make with any confidence. We know what will happen eventually to the baby boomers. What we don't know is how the boomer legacies might reshape the country one final time. The answers in this book will help us manage the historic disruption of the American state we are now experiencing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post columnist Bump debuts with an insightful if overstuffed look at the baby boom generation and "the grip that it held and still holds on our national conversation." Complementing his original reportage with copious charts and graphs, Bump details the post-WWII "baby tsunami" that saw the average number of births increase from 2.9 million per year to just below four million, and investigates how certain characteristics of boomers, who skew whiter than the general population and are less likely to have a college degree, contribute to today's political polarization. Noting that schools built in the 1960s and '70s to meet the spike in student-age population are being converted into senior living centers, Bump also explores likely "shifts in power, status, and identity" as boomers' percentage of the overall population declines, noting a growth in Republican strength among working-class voters of color and increased assimilation among Hispanics, among other trends. More than 100 graphs visualize issues of race, political beliefs, education, and socioeconomic levels in novel ways, allowing Bump to draw counterintuitive insights, including that the depletion of Social Security resources "is the system working as intended and not representing some sudden collapse." Often, however, the data overwhelms and the arguments sprawl in diffuse directions. This intriguing survey bites off a little more than it can chew.
