Now, as far as the whole thing there are all different people. Some of them were College Students who were also working. Some of them were living at home like maria was living at home and going to college. Some of them had jobs. There was a musician who was very much involved who made a good living as a Computer Programmer and some of them mostly shoplifted and lived in squat so there were all sorts of different people. Unfortunately we have run out of time but i want to thank you for your questions. You manage to touch on many of the areas. I hope to would have more time to explore and theyre so much more in the book. Mosh a guess and will be sunning outside and i would like to ask all of you to think about supporting this program but rings these kinds of writers to los angeles, and donations of course i am sure if you talk to Louise Steinman outside you can figure out a way to handle that. Look forward to her new work. She is riding she is writing on the tsarnaev brothers and the boston massacre. When do you expect that . I dont know. We can look forward to that and i want to thank you so much for coming to los angeles. [applause] [inaudible conversations] up next on book tv after words with guest host jonathan last a Senior Writer at the Weekly Standard and author of what to expect when no one is expecting. This week paul taylor and his latest book the next america boomers, millenials and the looming generational showdown. In it the pew Research Director examines how the demographic changes in america are likely to shape u. S. Culture in the coming decades. Particularly as the population at large gets older. This program is about an hour. Host paul taylor welcome. Tell me about Ida May Fuller. Guest Ida May Fuller was a never married legal secretary from brattleboro vermont. She was the first person ever to receive a Social Security check in her retirement in 1940 just after her 65th birthday. It bore the number 00001 and it was a monthly check for a little over 22. Ida was clever enough to live for another 35 years. She died at age 100. In the course of those 35 years the czechs kept coming and at the end she had received about 23,000 over the course of her retirement. It doesnt sound like much in todays dollars but if you then look at what i do put into the system when she raced tired the system was only three years old and she had only contributed for three years. With what she put an end her employer put in what ida got back on those return 500 fold. She is the poster girl for a demographic reality about Social Security that is very current today which is that the system was absolutely at its best in the first generation. It was very good for the next generation and honored those but by the time we fastforward to 2014 it is an big demographic trouble because way back then we had 30, 40, 50, even 150 people retiring lee. It goes down precipitously in the gets to 10 to one and then down to five to one and by the time all todays 65yearolds the famous baby boom generation who are crossing the threshold at age 65 that the rate of 10,000 a day and will do so every day between now and 2030 when they get to the end of that we have just two workers for every retiree. The math that Franklin Delano roosevelt put in place 75 years ago doesnt work anymore and unfortunately we have todays young adults the socalled millennial generation who are having a lot of trouble Getting Started in life because they have, of age in a hostile economy. They are paying money into a system to support a level of benefits for todays retirees that they have no realistic chance of getting when they themselves retire. So there needs to be a rebalancing of the social compact. Its a very important challenge and its a very difficult challenge for this country politically. Not only is Social Security and medicare half of our budget its by far the biggest thing we do, but its symbolically the purest statement in Public Policy that is the country we are community all in this together. These are programs that affect everybody and the old math of these programs doesnt work. If you start from ida and you come to today its host go ida got a mop up our money adventure but in the system. Todays baby boomers, whats it like for them . Guest if you look at Social Security alone or her Social Security and medicare. And medicare was added in 1965 by lbj. If you have those two together for most of todays baby boomers they still come out ahead and they wont get nearly the windfall returns at this first generation got that they will still come out ahead. A photo typical baby boomer who retires in 2014. I say look if she lives her actuarially allotted 20 additional years in good health shell get roughly a half a Million Dollars in benefits for Social Security and medicare. Of that she and her employers over her working life and begin shes the media and, shes the typical, will have paid maybe 380,000 and the remainder of that is going to be picked up by todays and tomorrows taxpayers. The trouble is that the fastforward not too today 65 euros but 45yearolds or todays 25yearolds they are almost all of them in negative territory. They will pay more in over the course of their lifetime than they will get back. Host go at its heart your book is about this generational tension caused by specifically this question on entitlements. Tell us about the four american generations currently bouncing around our country. Guest what i would say about what the book is about, didnt start out to write a book about generational equity. I started out to write a book about demographic social and political change. I work at the Pew Research Center. We do a lot of Public Opinion survey and they have a lot of demographers and political scientists and other social scientists and economists and we sort of look at trends again political social economic and we look at them through lots of lenses but over the decade that ive been working there looking at them through the generational lens is quite fascinating because we are in an era where the generation gaps seem unusually large. America has always had this generational gaps because america is a Dynamic Society and we always have younger adults doing differently than their parents or grandparents did in this particular moment these gaps across all dimensions that we are ingested in have gotten very wide. The largest of those gaps is racial and ethnic. We are now 40 or 50 years into the third immigration wave in our countries history. It began in the mid60s from a pass legislation to open the borders having closed their borders back in the 1920s in reaction to the previous immigration wave and the board has stayed close through world wars and we are ready to open them up again. What is distinctive about the modern immigration wave first of all an absolute numbers more immigrants than the two previous ways put together although as a share of the population is still not as big but is really distinctive art to first waves going back to the early 19th and 20 sentry nine of 10 were from europe. In this wave half of our from latin america and nearly 30 arcent from asia and only 10 are from europe. This wave is changing our racial complexion and make up and we are now a country that is on the path to become majority nonwhite before the middle of this century sometime in early 2040s according to the census bureau. He a pretty dramatic change so someone my age and im actually one of those boomers that is about to turn 65 this year so im born into a country that is 85 white and i will be living in the country seemed that is 43 white. For people my age it is disorienting. For people my childrens and grandchildrens age its the only america they have known and some most natural thing in the world. This plays out in a lot of ways. I start the book with an odd how moment on the night of president obamas reelection victory in 2012. I am an old political reporter and interested in whats going to happen with the election outcome. I used to have a bad habit of trying to forecast things and im about as reliable as a coin flip. I was struck on Election Night by the number of really smart conservative and republican political analysts, pollsters, commentators who were flummoxed by the outcome who really expected that romney to win that election and they had a loss of reason to expect that. We had four years of the terrible economy and Unemployment Rate at eight, nine, 10 . Obama not only one but one easily. He won by 5 million 500 million votes in the opening pages catches the commentary of the rush limbaughs who says the white establishment is no longer a majority and bill orielly we are outnumbered. This where was a moment where one of our Political Parties realize the country we thought we were going to win and is in the country they came out and voted that day. Mitt romney wound up with just 17 of the nonwhite vote. That doesnt argue well for a Major Political party looking at the future change of the country. Now you asked about the generations have you play this out generationally if you start from the oldest generation, there are the whitest generation and the most conservative generation politically. They are the socalled silent generation that came of age in the 40s and 50s. They have been conservative much of their lives. Financially they are our most secure generation and a lot of the upheavals of the Great Recession and a five to eight years ago they were mostly able to escape. Most of them had have paid off their mortgages on their homes so all that foreclosure going on did not affect them that much. Many if not most of them were already retired and didnt have jobs to lose but nonetheless they are very anxious frankly about the changing complexion of the country. They are somewhat disoriented i think of the digital revolution and the new ways that people communicate. The next oldest generation are the boomers. They are in their 50s and 60s and the oldest are probably not 67 so they are on the cusp of retirement. They were famous generation. The famous generation back in the 60s when they were the leaders of the counterculture. The womens rights, civil rights and antiwar. They were a generation, known as a generation of protesters however that label never capture the full political breadth of the generation. As a point on the in the book the first election boomers were able to vote old enough to vote was in 1972 in that happened to be the first election where we voted at 18. A majority of baby boomers in the election voted for Richard Nixon and not the antiwar challenger. Nonetheless they have become more conservative as they have gotten older. They are worried about their own finances and as they head into retirement and if you look at all the ways we assess whether they are ready for retirement or not it turns out 40 or roughly half arent. Most people say if you want to have the same lifestyle in retirement you had one in your working years you need to replace 70 or 80 of your income the median boomers will replace 65 . Its not a calamity but theres a lot of nervousness. The next generation is the gen xers in their late 30s and 40s. They too are worried about their retirement. They are sometimes said to be kind of the savvy entrepreneurial loners. They are somewhat distrustful of the institutions and distrustful of government. The reagan revolution in the divorce revolution and the cultural messages they got as they grew up which is its a tough road out there. Figure out your place in it your place in it and do what you can to make it the best and finally the millennials who are now in their midteens to early 30s. They are our largest generation numerically since the boomer generation. They have come into the work wars and the electorate with a loud noise. Not quite the social protest that we recall from the boomers but in their voting habits they are our most liberal generation in modern history. Three or four National Elections in a row where they have voted much more democratic and there is a old boating grab gap that is the largest its ever been. The racial and ethnic profile for antennas nonwhites and nonwhites tend to be liberal. They tend to be believers in Big Government and that plays out here. They are also having a terrible time Getting Started in life. A lot of them are ready to go into the workforce. The economy went into a tailspin and hasnt fully recovered from that so they have some of the largest Unemployment Rates of any young generation starting out. We just put out a report earlier this month. They are so far we took a look at the oldest of the millennials in their mid20s to early 30s so presumably by then they are through their formal education and they want to be in the workforce and starting out their lives. But if you look at all the indicators in the economic wellbeing of todays millennials and you compare them with xers or boomers in the age where millennials are doing worse. They have higher rates of unemployment and higher rates of party. They have lower personal incomes they have lower wealth so they are in danger of becoming the first generation in modern history perhaps in our history of doing less well in life than their parents generation. We know dont know how the story ends but at least we know how the story is starting that starts to chip away at the American Dream touches the notion of ever upwards generational mobility. Host you talk a lot about the wealth gap. It manifests itself from the housing bubble. You talk about the effects of the housing bustle in the two groups. Guest the story of the housing bubble is wellknown and the great crisis in the late 90s and americans looked around and for the typical American Household the value of your house is Something Like 75 of your total aggregate wealth. People look around and say my goodness i have gotten rich and behaviors changed and people ran up a lot of debt. They use the value the house on consumption and it seemed like a great idea. Housing prices would go up and it was wonderful but we know what happens with bubbles. They eventually burst and the sun burst in 2006. It had a terrible effect on the rest of the economy or the Financial Markets seized up and everything goes in to collapse and we know the aspect of that story. What is less wellknown is how strong an age via there was to that story. If you think about older adults most of them by the time this double burst most of them had purchased their homes at prebubble prices. They enjoyed the runup but even when everything came down they were still ahead of the game and import and most of them if you talk about 60, 70 or 80yearolds paid off their mortgage so they were not in danger of going under water and facing foreclosure and all the rest. If you think about todays 20yearolds and 30yearolds those who had purchased a home and many hadnt but those who had almost all of them purchased a home at double inflated prices and when the bubble burst they are the ones who went underwater. They are the ones disproportionally effaced foreclosure and have seen their wealth which wasnt all that high to begin with if that rate. One statistic from the book if you go back to 1984 and you compare the wealth of all households headed by someone under the age of 35 versus all households headed by someone over the age of 65 the gap is 10 times the one in favor of folks at the upper end. That makes sense, people accumulate wailed as they grow older. By 2011 the gap had grown from 10 1 to 26 1. My guess is it has grown. Its almost certainly that it has grown. This is one of many indicators that suggest over the course of many decades now some of this is driven by the housing bubble and the Great Recession over the last five or six years but many of these patterns are decades old and relatively speaking the old have prospered relative to the young. Thats not to say that the older in great financial shape. Theres a mix of people people are doing well and not general but todays older doing better than yesterdays old. Host your book the next america has many numbers which we are grateful for. Every two or three pages theres a number the snaps her head back and one of them seems a little frivolous but this snapped my head back. The numbers of tattoos and the numbers of tattoos have crept up. Can you talk about the growth of tattoos . Guest we did a survey on millennials in this goes back for five years now. Its hard not to notice that tattoos are more prevalent in the culture than they used to be as i wrote in the book back in the day the tattoos were the body where sailors, hookers and strippers. They were faintly distributable. Today they are totally mainstream especially among the young so we found 37 of all millennials have a tattoo as compared to five or 6 of people in the oldest generation. The oldest manoa niels that have a tattoo one is not enough. Most have two or more and one in six have more. One of the points i make and maybe its a stretch but it seems reasonable to me by the Pew Research Center drawing inferences from the numbers and let others speculate as to what may be going on. One of the things that has been said of the millennial generation is that they are the be me generation and tattoos are real manifestation of that. What was seemed to be driving that is they are the first generation of digital natives. They have grown up in a world where its the most natural thing. This is the way you live. You have this thing in your hand and you on it and it exposes you to a world of information. Exposes you to a network of friends. You can take a picture of yourself and share with your friends. All of these things are million to someone who is my age but many people my age have adapted to this and they get how empowering it is. What makes the