Book
The aftermath : the last days of the baby boom and the future of power in America
Publication Information
[New York, New York] : Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2023]
Physical Description
xiv, 401 pages : illustrations, maps, charts ; 25 cm
Summary
"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"--
Contents
- Introduction
- A baby tsunami
- All things must pass
- How to spot a boomer
- The politics of the new generation gap
- The post-boomer cultural era has arrived
- Who will inherit the economic boom?
- The importance of what we don't know
- The importance of what we don't know about ourselves
- A new American politics
- Getting from here to wherever "there" is.