An Interview with Author and Demographics Expert Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor is the author of “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown.” The book draws on his work at the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. He served as the center’s executive vice president from 2003 to 2014 and oversaw all of its demographic, social and generational research.
Mr. Taylor has given presentations on generational change to major universities and businesses across the country. He appears frequently on television and radio public affairs programs and has written for many of the nation’s leading print publications.
He also was a newspaper reporter for 25 years, the last 14 at the Washington Post, where he covered three U.S. presidential campaigns and served as bureau chief in South Africa during the historic transformation from apartheid to democracy.
His other books include “See How They Run” and “The Old News Versus the New News.” He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and twice served as the visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
Mr. Taylor will be a featured speaker at the CLA’s Excellence in Laundry Conference, which will be held May 18-19 at Ojai Valley Inn & Spa in Ojai, Calif.
Let’s talk about your latest book, “The Next America.” Why did you feel it was important to write on this topic at this time?
The United States in the early 21st century is at a point of extraordinary change – racial change, social change, political change and technological change – and these changes overlap each other. They’re creating generation gaps. They’re creating a new profile of what the country looks like and changing some of its core values.
For more than a decade at the Pew Research Center, we’d been doing public opinion survey research, and economic and demographic data analysis. So, I was watching this change unfold, using numbers to try to illuminate the story. It got to a point where I thought it would make sense to put it all into a book to see how these different changes relate to one another and where they’re taking the country.
In the book, you note that America is in the midst of a demographic overhaul. What have been some of most striking demographic shifts you’ve noticed in recent years? And what were some of the reasons for those shifts?
The two shifts I emphasize are that the U.S. is on its way to becoming majority non-white, while at the same time, a record share of our population is going gray. We’re getting older, and we’re getting more multi-racial.
And immigration is driving the change in our racial profile more than anything else. We’re in the midst of the third major immigration wave in our nation’s history. And what’s driving the aging of the population is a mix of longer lifespans and smaller birthrates – and that aging trend is playing out all over the world.
In your book, you write extensively about Millennials. They’re notoriously well-educated, tech-savvy… and underemployed. How are they going to shape the conversation going forward?
They’re already doing it, and there’s more to come. Millennials, as we define them, are adults born after 1980. Therefore, those oldest of them are in their mid-30s, and it’s about a 20-year generation; already, today, Millennials are the largest age group in the work force and the electorate. They are our transitional generation to a majority non-white America, as about 43 percent of Millennials are non-white. You can already see some of the racial and ethnic changes in this group.
They’re also having a very tough time getting started economically. They’re a downwardly mobile generation, if you compare their economic circumstances with those of their parents and grandparents at the same age.
However, they will have a lot of muscle. They’re setting the terms of our cultural norm. They’re champions of diversity. And, in their voting patterns, they’re quite liberal – even though they don’t particularly care to identify with a political party.
At the same time, we’re faced with more than 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring every single day. How is this situation impacting today’s demographics and business policies?
This has been a pig-in-a-python generation every step of the way. After all, in the 1950s and 1960s, you can argue that the suburbs were built to accommodate this very large generation. Of course, through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, the Boomers were in the workforce, and today, as you mentioned, they are migrating out of the workforce at 10,000 per day into retirement.
This will have a huge impact on our social safety net – Medicare and Social Security – which is financially dependent on taxpayers to pay the benefits of today’s retirees. We have all of these folks moving from being taxpayers to being retirees.
Then again, many Boomers are staying in the workforce longer than previous generations, in part because they’re in good health as they move into old age and want to stay active, and in part because some of them simply didn’t save enough.
In terms of the laundry industry, I can point to the continued growth in households in this country, which increasingly is led by Baby Boomers. Some of that is the result of a relatively newer phenomenon called “gray divorce” – where 30 to 40 years ago, one in 10 divorced couples were over the age of 50, now it’s one in four. This is creating new households.
You point out that, by mid-century, the U.S. population will be majority non-white, and our median age will edge above 40 – both unprecedented milestones. What can self-service laundry owners take away from this fact?
It would seem to me that this likely holds out some economic prospects for the laundry business. What we know about Millennials is that they are having a hard time getting started, so they’re at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale – and that may lead to more customers for laundromats.
Heavily Hispanic areas traditionally have been strong laundry markets. What types of shifts have you seen in the Hispanic population?
If you look at the Hispanic immigration wave, you notice that the heart of it is more than 50 years old. If you went back to its beginning in the ’60s and ’70s, you would see most of the settlement patterns in the Southwest; that is where the bulk of it occurred, with a few pockets elsewhere.
However, there has been considerable dispersion of the Hispanic population in the last several decades. Some of the fastest-growing parts of the country in terms of the Hispanic population are places like the Southeast and the Midwest, where you have certain industries, such as the meat-packing industry or the hospitality industry that have attracted a lot of Hispanic workers. This population has become much more diverse throughout virtually the entire country, and that has occurred over the last couple of decades.
What types of overall trends have you noticed with regard to unauthorized immigration?
Those population trends are interesting. The unauthorized population in this country exploded in the ’80s and ’90s, as well as the early part of this century. It grew from about 3 million to a peak of approximately 12 million a decade ago.
In the last decade, the unauthorized population has been almost completely flat. We estimate it at about 11.3 million. Of course, this doesn’t mean that unauthorized immigrants aren’t continuing to come to the country – they certainly are. However, there has always been sort of a circular pattern – some come, some go. But there has not been a net increase overall in a decade.
What does your research say about the current overall age of the U.S. population?
We’re getting older. Our median age is 37. And, if current trends continue, we’re on track for a median age of 41 by the middle of the century. But, although we’re getting older, the rest of the world’s advanced economies are getting older faster. For example, while we’ll be 41 by 2050, Japan will be 53, Germany will be 52 and China will be 47.
These other countries all are getting older faster, and the biggest reason is that they’re not receiving as many immigrants as the U.S. Immigration makes a country younger, in part because people tend to immigrate when they are in their 20s and 30s, and then they tend to have a lot of kids. Immigrants have about 50 percent more children than the native-born population. So, a combination of those two things will reduce the median age of a country.
What trends are shaping our older population?
One change, from 30 or 40 years ago, is a trend toward older adults aging in place. As we think back 30 or 40 years to the growth of the Sun Belt, a lot of older adults, as they retired, would find a place in Florida or Arizona. Today, there’s still some of that, but there also are a lot of adults in their 60s and 70s who want to stay where they’re at. Perhaps they’ve got extended family where they currently live. Maybe they feel they’ve still got a lot of gas left in the tank, and they’re not ready to fish and play golf all day. That’s certainly a change.
What’s happening regarding the number of households overall?
The number of households overall is increasing as our population increases. However, the two fastest-growing household types are the single-family household, which represents 25 percent of all households. The second-fastest growing household type is the multi-generational family household, with two or more adult generations under the same roof – 58 million Americans now live in multi-generational family households.
Where have you seen the greatest increases and the greatest losses in the number of households?
The Sun Belt continues to see a net gain of households; however, a big change is that California is no longer a huge net gain in terms of population and households. There’s been an exodus from California in the last 10 or 20 years.
Have there been any changes in the number of female-headed households?
Yes. This continues to increase, due to a combination of non-marriage and single mothers. Also, if you go back 50 years and look at households with children under 18, the woman was the sole or primary breadwinner in one in 10 of those households. Today, in 40 percent of households with kids, the woman is the sole or primary breadwinner. This has to do with non-marriage, children being born to single mothers, and divorce.
The structure of families has changed. In our economy, the male attachment to the workforce has come down significantly. This has occurred at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. We’re moving more toward a knowledge-based economy. Perhaps 30 or 40 years ago, a young man with only a high school diploma might have been able to get a job at the local factory and have a good middle-class life. But, today, there are fewer of those jobs and, as a result, fewer of those types of male-headed households.
What’s the state of the “traditional” family household?
Overall household size has continued to get smaller, although it hasn’t declined that much in the last few decades. Of course, if you go back 50 years or more and think of the traditional family household – the “Ozzie and Harriet household,” with Mom, Dad and the kids – that is no longer the typical family household. In fact, there is no typical family household. Fewer than half of American children live under the same roof as both of their biological parents.
We have an enormous diversity of households – whether it’s female-headed households, households where the parents are cohabitating but not married, extended family households, multi-generational households, blended families and all of the above. There is no longer any such thing as a typical family household.
How has overall household income changed?
When you make an apples-to-apples comparison and correct for inflation, median household income peaked in this country in 2000. It has never returned to that peak. In fact, this is the longest stretch since we’ve kept records on this type of data that the median household income has not returned to an earlier peak.
If you look at the frustration of the American public, that is part of what’s at the heart of it.
Household income has stagnated due in part to globalization. Our workers today are competing with workers all over the world. China and India have almost doubled the size of the world’s workforce in the last 20 to 30 years. Therefore, they put competitive pressures on wages, and multi-national corporations now can shop around for cheaper places to do things. In some ways, you can say the American consumer benefits from this; however, at the same time, the American worker is facing really challenges.
Another way to tell this story is to go back 50 years, when the largest employer in the U.S. was General Motors. In today’s dollars, the median GM worker earned about $35 an hour. Today, the largest employer in the U.S. is Walmart, and the median Walmart employee earns $9 an hour. That’s part of globalization, and it’s also part of technological change. There aren’t that many factory jobs at GM anymore because, instead of workers doing those assembly line jobs, robots are doing those jobs. The whole country has to adapt.
Have you done any studies on America’s wealth gap? And does this inequality break down along racial, ethnic and educational lines?
The wealth gap in the U.S. is bigger than it’s been at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
If you measure the wealth gap between races, it has gotten bigger and bigger. In other words, whites relative to blacks and Hispanics have more wealth than they used to. If you measure it by age, it also has gotten bigger. The typical household headed by someone over 65 today has 20 times the wealth of the typical household headed by somebody under the age of 35; if you go back just a generation, the gap wasn’t a 20 to 1 ratio – it was only 8 to 1.
And, within almost every group that you look at, wealth gaps have increased. Even within groups, the gap has grown. For instance, if you look inside the African-American community or the Hispanic community or the Millennials community, you will see the same pattern. The rich within those groups have pulled away from the rest of the pack in those groups. This trend cuts across virtually every demographic category.
You’ve mentioned seeing growth in multi-generational households. What’s driving this trend?
There are many sociological factors driving it. In part, it’s a result of immigration, since immigrants historically tend to double- and triple-up. They believe in the future. They scrimp and save for a better future, and one way to do that is to have a number of generations under one roof.
In addition, this trend is being driven by elderly adults, who are living with their middle-aged children. Often, in those cases, they’re living in the elderly adults’ houses, because the middle-aged children may have run into home foreclosure issues or other things.
But the biggest trend driving this growth is the fact that a lot of Millennials are living with their middle-aged parents. Approximately 39 percent of Millennials, ages 18 to 35, live with their parents. This has to do with the fact that they’ve had a difficult time getting started economically. It’s hard to find jobs and to launch careers. As a result, Millennials’ marriage rates are very low. Today, about a quarter of Millennials are married; if you look back to their parents’ generation at the same age, half or more were married.
If you don’t have a great job and if you’re not married, your parents’ house isn’t a bad place to hang out – the refrigerator is always stocked, and you don’t have to put quarters into the washer and dryer.
For obvious reasons, apartment dwellers and other renters have always been strong laundromat customers. What does your research tell you about the “renter population” in the U.S.?
This population is growing. One way to measure how it’s growing is to examine the decline of the homeowner population, which peaked a decade or more ago, right before the housing bubble crashed. Just before that crash, about 69 percent of adults lived in homeowner households; today, that number is down by about 5 percent or 6 percent.
Therefore, obviously, the number of renters has gone up. The economy has slowly been climbing out of that housing-induced wreck, but I don’t think homeownership rates have risen that much – and I think a lot of it may have to do with the fact that Millennials are not forming households. They’re not getting married; they’re not buying homes; and they’re not buying cars.
The big question: Is this just a delayed phenomenon, and will Millennials eventually do all of the things that somebody my age identifies with as milestones to adulthood, or are they going to live different lives? I think the jury is still out on that, but I think it’s probably a combination of both. Yes, I think Millennials will “catch up” to older generations, but I don’t think they will catch up at the same levels.
What are some of the most interesting population trends you’ve noticed in recent years, of which small-business owners like laundromat operators should take note?
With the rise of the Millennials generation, it’s important to note that this is very much a technology-enabled generation. Just look at the disruptive instincts and behaviors Millennials bring to traditional businesses – the Ubers, the Airbnbs and the tens of thousands of others. Think about the sort of “share economy” or “reputation economy” on which these innovations are based. Airbnb didn’t exist 10 years ago; yet, as of 2016, it will host more travelers than the world’s largest hotel chain. That is a lot of change in a very short period of time.
Consider the different ways in which Millennials shop and the different ways they move around, as well as their whole attitude toward ownership versus sharing – all of which is mobile-technology-enabled. We have a proliferation of small businesses that must adapt to this. Today’s business owners have to be nimble.
Frankly, it’s quite probable that we haven’t seen anything yet. We’re only in the first decade or two of this digital revolution. Who knows where it’s taking us next? But wherever it is, it’s the Millennials and probably their younger brothers and sisters who will get there ahead of the rest of us.
Laundry owners also need to take note of the country’s diversity. Just 50 years ago the U.S. was 85 percent white, and today we’re on path by the middle of this century to majority non-white.
Our diversity is and can be an enormous source of strength. It has been a source of strength throughout our history, and we need to find the better angels of our nature to embrace this diversity.
In fact, I think young adults do embrace it. They embrace it in a fundamental way because it’s really the only America they’ve ever known. However, some older folks may look at the profile of the country, see how it’s changing and feel like a bit of a stranger in their own land. By contrast, twentysomethings don’t feel that sense of estrangement – and, if they can harness the dynamism that comes from not only technological change but racial and ethnic diversity as well, count me as bullish on America. I think we’ve got a great future ahead.
As a nation, where do you see the U.S. headed?
I’m an American chauvinist. I think we are – and have been for much of our history – the world’s indispensable nation in terms of promoting the values that I think are values any society would want to live under. I think the world needs us to remain a promoter of those values, and there is no reason we can’t be.
At the moment, we’re going through a rough patch, but I have faith that this country’s values will come to the fore – and our diversity, if we treat it the right way and accept it, will be an enormous source of strength going forward.
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