The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America (Unabridged)
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A widely-read 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.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF of charts from the book.
Customer Reviews
Good demographic information, but 2 major issues
This is a good overall book that breaks down many assumptions we have in America around demographics. Sometimes challenging them, sometimes affirming them, sometimes doing both.
There are 2 major issues though. One is that for a data driven book, almost all of the graphs are only “in the print edition.” It doesn’t stop you from understanding the main themes, but the audiobook is a much lesser experience. I deducted a star for this lack of complete presentation.
Second, this is really more of a political book that analyzes demographic info relative to politics. There are sections that are related to the title, but much of this book is more general and broad in its analysis of the data. I deducted another star for this book not really being on point. I was hoping to learn more about how the baby boomers will be going away and what that will mean. It’s addressed a bit, but there’s a lot of general politics too.
Again, it’s interesting but not 100% on topic and not as informative as the print version.