Convinced that we have to continue to lead the world into the kind of future that we want. We cant sit on the sidelines. We cant retreat. Were going to have setbacks, disappointments, but over time our story has become the dominant story. It represents the hopes and aspirations of people everywhere. Thats what i want americans to understand, and the main reason i wrote this book, i know theres a big debate going on about our role in the world and we have some real unfortunate consequences still to do with from prior decisions and the like, but we cant abdicate our responsibility to how we define it, how to execute it will be the stuff of political debate. But the world needs us. America matters to the world, and yes, the world matters to america for our prosperity and our security and our democracy. Hillary clinton spoke with us about her decisionmaking process, the perceptions of the United States around the globe, and some of the decisions she had to make as secretary of state or the full interview airs on booktv saturday july 5 at 7 p. M. Eastern and sunday july 6 at 9 15 a. M. Eastern. Paul taylor talks at what the u. S. Will look like in the near future as the baby boomer generation retires and millennials start to exert their influence. Its next on booktv. Thank you, market. Hello and welcome to the chicago tribunes jerome lit fest. I have thi have a prejudice begy with paul taylor who wrote this are so pl book, the next america boomers, millennials, and the looming generational showdown so its a very fat have a book which would expect nothing less talkin comcoming from a former reporter but itsg fascinating and it talks a lot about who we are, who we are becoming and how tha was shape who we are in the future. So welcome, paul. No i always think these programs are better when the audience participates so i will as was mentioned lease in time forwell questions, so think about those questions and save them in your brain and step up to the microphone when the time comes. Time comes. I think you youll make it a much better conversation. Paul, your book lays out a compelling challenge about the string in the gaps that exist between the generations. You say that they are really pulled apart when it comes to certain things, including things like demographics, politics. I hope that we can touch on all of these things today. But your book focuses mostly on the living generation, the silent generation, the baby boomers, and the millennialist. And you have a really nice couple pages that talk rudely about each generation and im wondering if you could read that to or in what we will be talking about. Happy to do so. These are our core generations and i will start with the orioles born after 1980. So here is. Slow to a adulthood and sexual diversity, confidence and Economic Future and then in a very unscientific way, this and other generations. Icons of this, mark zuckerberg, carrie underwood, jennifer lawrence, lady gaga. Next up we have discovered their host your situation. This includes the reagan revolution and the divorce revolution. More comfortable than they are boulders with an increasingly diverse america. Quentin tarantino, adam samberg, tiger woods, Robert Downey junior. Next up, they be boomers, im one of them born from 1946 through 1954 and exuberant view is whether this. That the iconic image of that describes only a portion. They are worried about retirement and wondering why they arent young anymore. Bill and hillary clinton, george w. Bush, barack obama, steve jobs, tom hanks. And finally, our oldest generation from 192821945, they are now in their late 60s and they are conservative conformist that are uneasy with the pace of democratic culture and technical change in the growing size of government. It icons like clint eastwood, marilyn monroe, tom brokaw, hugh hefner. So there you go. That is who everyone is. I think we have a few baby boomers in the audience. And so one thing that strikes me is that even though you say they are not scientific, there are no women among this. So i was talking with a friend about that and we were trying to think about it. So there are a lot of successful women, but to get to this status, it was hard for us and i wonder what that said about our generation. Shell samberg was the best we could come up with or molly ringwald. Its a great question, and its one of the dramatic changes that have happened in the years that i have tracked and especially in this century. Generation stories are one of the greatest in this era. Gender roles are converging both at work and at home and we have a lot of data on that. And so there are gender changes at work that we know about, the pay gap is shrinking. It hasnt completely disappeared. Without the work level one we ask young adults and millennialist how important are the following things in your life and more young women today that young man say that this is a very important aspiration. This is a complete reversal. We live with nearly six in 10 College Students that are women. So again, a complete reversal. And we see this in homeland today. Of all children being raised, 40 of those are raised in a household where the woman and the mother is either the solar the primary breadwinner and a lot of that is an increasing share of that. These are big changes with this by a large and what do you you think of the best sort of manner and they share the responsibility to raise less. Seventy or 80 of americans say in that sense the norms have shifted. But then if you go a little bit underneath that and you say that, how important is it for a child to have a mother at home . About 50 or 60 say its very important. So how important is it for a child to have a father at home . So behaviors have changed, the rules and norms have changed, but some of the traditional expectations still reflect a. So now let me turn back to your question. And believe me, those icons are not scientific. I will tell you that some on the looks of these cultural trends, its a lot easier to find young women who have made their mark in their 20s, visavis young man than older women. And this is just the way most societies have been oriented for most of human history. It tends to be the man who rides up. Those who famously become the celebrities and waiters in society. But that is clearly changing. We talked a little bit earlier about how we have a middle child syndrome. We are the doityourself generation stuck between two giant influential generations. Can you talk about why is that . Why are we so selfsufficient . Well, i think that selfsufficiency has to do with the parenting of the norms. And i think there was a phrase to describe this with young adults in their 30s and 40s and when they were children, they came into this lexicon and you probably remember that. They were the children that despite very heavily in the 70s and 80s of divorced parents. A lot of todays middleaged adults were a product of that and you also have a situation where typically the divorced single mother is having to work. So how do you find a way to work and take care of your kid and how do you balance all of that. And americans are pretty resilient about that. This includes the multigenerational family households. So a lot of that is for childcare. Some of that is a middleaged person taking care of grandma and grandpa and a lot of that is them living with their daughters and sons in helping out with her grandchildren. So that is one accommodation and another is a trademark of time, as my child old enough to kick your of herself and here is the key, go home, go to your room, and i think, i dont overstate that, but i think that that is part if you are raised in that environment, one of the messages you need to get is anchor institutions of society, you cant fully trust them, and of course it is the nuclear family. So if that family is in what it wise, let me say this about divorce first. Fifty years ago 5 were Single Parents and 40 today are. So you have a lot of children who are not starting out in the tradition of Nuclear Families and then you have pretty high the divorce rates that have leveled off. So these are trends all over the world and that is the case that a teenager in america today, and this was true back in the other generation as well. They have less of a chance of being raised by both biological parents and teenager anywhere else in the world. So as you go through this, youre adapted, your resilient, but it does send a message that you better take care of yourself out there because youre not sure that you can trust us. So the last thing is as this generation came of age, it was sort of the reagan era and the followup to it is dominant message is that government isnt a solution the solution but the problem. So with older generations, fdr, governments, world war ii, this generation rose up with vietnam and all the rest. So i think that that influences a certain skepticism and wariness about the institutions. The bigger generations talk about the millennialist and why did they do this and that, and i was thinking something that your book points out, that they are the children of baby boomers. Well, what did they learn from the baby boomers who make them who they are today . So to start again with parenting norms, i think that we are talking about midtolate teenagers in their 30s, is that this is a generation where everybody gets a trophy, its a very nurturing generation. And this may be in reaction to the times we live in, global terrorism, stranger danger, its a mean world out there, school shootings, on and on, and it seems to me a lot of the complexities and threat of modern life have taken the normal inferences and parents have put them on steroids, if you will. So i think that that is the message that boomers have gotten, uvb protected and wary in the same thing prevails. And i think that the other incredibly important thing that informs the millennial czar, they are the first generation of this. So someone my age, they may say that it is our indispensable platform for social interaction. Someone is always going to be upside about these things. Im a former newspaper reporter. Its astonishing that we hold this in our hands. So metaphorically i tend to have access to the sum of all human knowledge. And so it is still astonishing. But its not astonishing to a 20 or 25yearold. And it is enormously empowering because they believe, and how could they not believe that the universe really can evolve around him. So in the world that they navigate they can create their own tribes and find this that is of interest to them and place themselves at the center of this and it seems like the most natural thing in the world and they shall all their friends what they are doing and essentially people want to know that. And sometimes people want to talk about it. Maybe that is sort of who they are. So i think in many ways it is very empowering. And i think the boomers are saying, well, youre constantly taking this pictures of yourself, although they shouldnt be the ones to point fingers because the the boomers have sort of retired the trophy. Yes, they agree. In one sense, that selfabsorption is true for both generations and it expresses itself in different ways. Is a very good point. So the millennialist, they are an adult milestone that others have defined. Is all their fault . They really are slow walking. Starting a career, you have kids, that is sort of the drill. And this is significantly happening later in life. So the median age of marriage, someone who got married at age 21, it was in 1970. And it was the early 20s and now its the late 20s. So that is a huge change. And why is it . I think predominately the reason has to do with something very distinctive about the millennial generation, which is they have been dealt a terrible economy. If you think of a 30yearold, here she comes of age and they do this through an economy that has increased in the housing market. We know the story. They have had a terrible time Getting Started. A lot of those come out with their regular shares and define themselves as getting to be unpaid interns. Many had been turned out. The refrigerators are usually stock and they dont have to put coins in the washington washing machine. Until when we ask young adults today who want to get married, the overwhelming number say yes. And then we have to say, what is holding you back. And i am paraphrasing here. And so it is a much slower walk. The other important thing to note is that among this generation of young adults, they are all Getting Started in again, the story of Student Loan Debt is very wellknown and it tends to be what we focus on a lot, but some are really having a difficult time also getting their lives going, and its the kids that didnt go to college. So if you work at the gap of attainment with this generation, there are obviously gads with unemployment rates and theres a marriage gap that is sort of losing this. So are they eventually going to get married . They say that they would like to. But we can look at todays millennialist. You go back at the same state and 60 were married. So will they catch up in their 30s and 40s . Perhaps, perhaps not. But what we need is the lower end of the socioeconomic scale with these foundations to do so and that becomes a selfperpetuating cycle because marriage is thousands of years in history and the foundation in economic arrangements. And so that is a very important social challenge. We have a lot in data in the book that talks about diversity in america and how labels are changing. Some of that is driven by immigration. So almost everyone is a product of someone who came here. We will back at them as risk takers and maternal optimist to give up everything to come here. Are those the same . Absolutely. Those kinds of core attitudes, beliefs, optimism about the future, being willing to be a part of the future. Todays immigrants stand above todays nativeborn. We think of the core American Values and we have those in access. They are very different in one very important way. This is the third great wave of immigration in our history. In chicago knows this very well and you guys have been able to get it. But 90 came from somewhere in europe. Todays rate again in 1965 after a 30 or 40 year hiatus brought on by restrictive immigration legislation in total numbers since 1965 we have had more than 40 million and when you add them up together, theres only 32 million. So in terms of sheer numbers, this is one of the biggest, although it is coming into the country and has a Larger Population base. So its 50 from latin america, its about 30 from asia and it has exceeded latin american immigration. And it has all of the values that you described and now has a large wave of those who are aging into the electorate and the economy and aging into the age that people get married and start tap emilys. So here you see a started change. So of all this of this in the last year in this country, 16 were across racial and ethnic lines and as i put in the book, one will barack obama was married in 1951, that particular marriage between a black person and a white horse and was one 10th of 1 of marriages across lines. It was a taboo. Today driven by asian and hispanic immigrants, when they married, more than a quarter married out and there is a lot of marriage across all of these lines and as a country we have been dealing with this for better or worse with racial identifying and that is frankly what most societies are doing with. But the racial tapestry has gone to most of our history, predominately white with some black and yes, there has always been racial intermixing within that tapestry called the one drop rule and so that is sort of in the way that the culture has treated us. And so now it is much more interested in complex and has high levels of this and so what do they call themselves reign and in some ways are old labels are not keeping up with our new marriages. The Pew Research Center did research for we asked the public, what do you think of the president and so the majority of them are very significant individuals that had it the other way. A thing that obama calls himself, he had the chance to say i am white or black where the center allows me not to say that more than one race. He chose black and he got a little bit of blowback. Saying why dont you claim all of your bloodlines. And i think that part of the drama is that these categories are going to have to respond to the new realities. So one thing i do is put together a list of mixedrace celebrities. I worked in south africa and you know what they have done on race. But the group in south africa is not always the africans but the mixedrace community. Way. Race mean Something Different to them. It doesnt mean were postracial, racial disappear. Race is pretty hardwired. But i think we are much more open, much more accepting and much more tolerant led by the young. How will this increasing diversity of america change politics, even down to the Political Parties of the future . Massively. So if it werent for the millennials we would be now into year two of the romneyi administration. You know, the Republican Party has a demographic challenge. It chose particularly in president ial years we get a higa turnout of all adults. They tend to go better in an Office Coming up where the electorate tends to be older and water. But here are the numbers. Are t. When barack obama was reelected year have a go he lost to mitt romney to 20 . He got killed. He lost the white vote in a landslide. He lost the white vote by the same 20 percentage point, and romney won the white vote by the same 20 Percentage Points he won by 1988 over michael dukakis. And there were 26 allegro college votes. It gave mitt romney 206 Electrical College votes. For windows 24 years the whites lost more than half of their electoral college. That is because, reflects a country, the census says it will happen in 200043, 30 years from now. There transition generation, much more mixed race public to read and every year. As more millennials agent to the electorate and more age out, nice way to move on the greater rewards, that a like to read, mitt romney won the light vote by 20 Percentage Points, he got 17 of the non white vote. And the ascendant to vote in the country. The reason the Republican Party is involved in an interparty civil war, if they look at these numbers and they say somebody described the Republican Party as the pale, male and sale party. If you get 70 and were on have to become a majority nonwhite countries they have big challenges, it will not be smooth sailing for the democrats. It is possible their own coalition will be fis