Snapshot of a Changing America

By Richard Stengel

"The United States themselves," wrote Walt Whitman, "are essentially the greatest poem." That epic is remade by every new generation, and today its rhythm, structure and content are unlike any that went before. The nation is growing middle-aged and more solitary. Men and women are delaying marriage, delaying childbirth, having few or no children at all. Real income, once expected to rise as naturally as a hot-air balloon, has leveled off. For many, home ownership, once thought of as practically a constitutional right, has become a dream denied. Demography is destiny, and Americans of today, in ways both obvious and subtle, are inventing the America of tomorrow.

Most of the changes have been triggered by the baby-boom generation. Born between 1946 and 1964, they are 75 million strong, one out of every three Americans, the largest generation in U.S. history. Next year the oldest of them will turn 40. The generation that could hum TV jingles before it could hum the national anthem, that made rock 'n' roll and protest into rites of passage, and swore never to trust anyone over 30, is becoming middle-aged.

In 1983 the median age of the population reached 30.9, the oldest ever, and is expected to exceed 36 by the year 2000. People who fox-trotted to Tommy Dorsey now outnumber those who hip-hop to Cyndi Lauper; for the first time in history, there are more Americans over 65 than there are teenagers. Notes Karl Zinsmeister, an economic demographer at the American Enterprise Institute: "By the late 1980s, one-half of our households will be headed by baby boomers. One-fourth of our population will be elderly. These two groups will define our society for a very long time."

Single people now account for 23% of all U.S. households. As many as 8% of today's adults will never marry.

Remember when unmarried men were called bachelors and unmarried women spinsters? Many of the 50 million "singles" in America are too young to recall. The Census Bureau reports that from 1970 to 1983 the proportion of never married singles ages 20 to 24 increased from 36% to 56% among women and from 55% to 73% among men. During that period, single-person households increased by 8.5 million. According to the Census Bureau, the increasing number of unmarried people in the pivotal 30-to-34 age bracket "suggests that an increasing proportion of persons may never marry."

Families with single heads grew by 69% from 1970 to 1983. One out of every five children, and more than half of all black children, lives in a one-parent household.

"Typical" is no longer an adjective that can describe the American household. Fifteen years ago, 40% of all households consisted of husband, wife and children; today that figure is 28.5%. The stereotypical nuclear family of mom, dad and two kids now accounts for only 11% of all households.

The number of female-headed households with one or more children under 18 doubled from 1970 to 1982, from 2.9 million to 5.9 million. During the 1970s the divorce rate shot up by half. Although it has dropped slightly, the U.S. rate remains the highest among all Western nations. Out-of-wedlock births jumped by 67% from 1970 to 1980.

Since 1970, the number of first births to women age 25 and older has more than doubled, while first births to women under 25 have declined. As many as one- fourth of all women of childbearing age may remain childless. The lowest total fertility rate in American history, 1.7, occurred in 1976.

Many working women of childbearing age have decided against having a child, while women with children are working in unprecedented numbers. In 1960 only 19% of women with children under six were in the work force; today half of them are. In general, women are waiting longer to have children and having fewer of them. From 1970 until 1982 the number of first births among women ages 30 to 34 tripled.

The total fertility rate declined from 3.7 births per woman in 1960 to 2.5 in 1970, and has wavered between 1.7 and 1.9 since 1976. The years from 1965 to 1976 are often called "the baby bust." While there was something of a "baby boomlet" in the late 1970s, it was due mainly to the enormous increase in women of childbearing age.

Immigration will keep the U.S. from shrinking. Without transplants, the population would crest at about 245 million in the year 2000 and then start declining. If the projected rates of immigration and fertility are realized, 100 years from now America will have a population of about 300 million, of whom 16% will be black, 16% Hispanic, 10% Asian and a diminishing majority of 58% non-Hispanic whites.

One out of four Americans is over the age of 50. By the turn of the century, more than 100,000 Americans will be 100 years or older, about three times the number today.

Demographers call them the new old. Healthy, vigorous and solvent, they confute the view that old age, as William Butler Yeats put it, is nothing but a tattered coat upon a stick. The 26% of the population over 50 controls three-quarters of the nation's financial assets and, with $130 billion in discretionary income, half of its spending power. "Today's elderly, especially the young elderly under 70, are a marketer's dream," says Alma Triner of Arthur D. Little Inc., a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

The over-65 set is doing almost as well. In 1965 one-third were classified below the poverty line; today only 14% are. But in 2025, when there will be some 64 million people over 65, the nation will have fewer than four working- age individuals for every retirement-age person. "This is the lowest ratio ever," says Gordon Green of the Census Bureau, "and has serious implications for the solvency of the Social Security system."

The "old old," or the "superelderly," as they are sometimes called, represent the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. The number of Americans over 85 could double by the year 2000.

In 1980, for the first time, the majority of Americans lived in the South and West. During the 1970s, California, Florida and Texas had 42% of the U.S.'s total growth.

Imagine that every American had the same weight and was placed on a flat, rigid map of the entire country. The balancing point would be just west of De Soto in Jefferson County, Mo. The center of population has been inching west by about 40 miles a decade, from outside Baltimore in 1790 and finally crossing the Mississippi in the 1970s.

"During the 1970s," says Calvin Beale, chief of population research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "every Sunbelt state had a rate of population growth that was higher than the U.S. as a whole." Some of the Sunbelt, however, is now in the shade; in the 1980s, population growth in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky has been lower than in the U.S. as a whole.

Migration drained the Frostbelt in the late 1970s. More than 1 million New Yorkers, for example, packed their suitcases and headed for the Sunbelt between 1975 and 1980, 375,000 of them bound for Florida. But in the past two years, states that were once synonyms for exhaustion have had small revivals: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan have gained population.

For two centuries, cities were an irresistible magnet for internal American migration. In the 1970s, however, that path was reversed as nonmetropolitan areas grew by 14.4% and metropolitan areas by 10.5%. Since 1980, however, that "rural turnaround" has again turned around, with metro areas growing faster than non-metro areas. But one aspect of the 1970s trend endures. "People are moving to smaller, less crowded communities," says Peter Morrison of the Rand Corp.'s population research center, "particularly those with a population under a quartermillion." Notes Bryant Robey, founder of American Demographics: "America's past has been one of steady centralization; its future is likely to be one of steady population deconcentration."

The workers most in demand since the 1970s have been secretaries. In the next ten years, the economy will need 800,000 custodians and 425,000 truck drivers.

Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, the business of America today is service. Since World War II, the U.S. has made the transition from smokestacks and assembly lines to copiers and computers. Today two-thirds of all people work in wholesale and retail trade, communications, government, health care and restaurants. The buzz word of the 1970s job market was high tech. In the next decade it will downshift to low tech. There will be tremendous expansion in such decidedly unglamorous occupations as cashier, registered nurse and office clerk.

Average household income in constant dollars is dropping steadily: from $21,400 in 1980 to $20,600 today. In 1981 less than a third of all households headed by a person under 35 had any discretionary income.

Baby boomers are having a hard time matching the living standards to which they were accustomed to as children. Demographers call it the promotion squeeze. There is not enough room at the top. Today the combined income of a young married couple, both of whom are working, is likely to be less than what either of their fathers earned at the same age. Baby boomers are not able to afford the houses they grew up in, and home-ownership rates have fallen for the first time since World War II.

The BMW-driving, Reebok-clad, madly acquisitive yuppies so beloved of Madison Avenue have proved to be something of a myth. They account for only about 6% of all baby boomers. The reality, says Ralph Whitehead Jr., an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts and an adviser to the Democratic Party, is the "new-collar" voter. The new collars are the college-educated sons and daughters of blue-collar parents; they earn between $20,000 and $40,000 and outnumber yuppies at least 5 to 1.

Between 1985 and 1995, there will be a drop of 18% in college-age Americans. In 1982, there was a decrease of 3% in both violent and nonviolent crime.

Colleges, the military and fast-food merchants depend on an endless supply of 18-year-old recruits. As Americans grow grayer, says Leon Bouvier of the Population Reference Bureau, "there could be real shortages in the labor force and the military." Baby boomers turned higher education into a multibillion-dollar business that employed more people than the automobile industry. Now universities will have to scale back.

Serious crime, traditionally a youthful failing, rose by 232% between 1960 and 1975, when baby boomers were in their teens and 20s. With fewer teenagers around, it should decline sharply by the end of the decade.

The skimpier the generation, the more room at the table. Demographer Richard Easterlin has a theory that economic well-being yields earlier marriages and higher fertility. Then fertility swings back and forth like a pendulum, from boom to bust, bust to boom. Members of the baby-bust generation will not face the teeming competition their parents did. They will struggle less and earn more. Rather like their grandparents. Sound familiar? Past being prologue, they could just produce another baby boom and start the cycle over again.

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With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston and Patricia Delaney/Washington