« Diversity = Productivity | Main | By the Numbers »
Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist, has new book out on young people, After the Boomers. The Wall Street Journal reviews it:
He is not prepared to accept the pop-culture representation of this generation as frivolous and determined to prolong childhood indefinitely. The people he interviewed were working long hours, trying to establish themselves in careers. And he notes that "they were so serious about figuring it all out that they were experiencing a lot of anxiety making decisions." For instance, the young men and women he interviewed were thinking about marriage early on in their lives (not just hooking up). "They often had fairly serious long-term relationships with someone they didn't end up marrying. That was a great source of frustration and disappointment."
I mainly agree. The young people I intrerviewed in doing the research for Rise, as well as my students, impress me a great deal. They're self-starters, motivated, and have great skills to boot. Though it you press them politely, they'll say boomer "hegemony" in music, culture, politics and other matters, is one of the things they're least enamored with.
For years, we in the X generation have listened to self-absorbed boomers decry and bemoan what they perceived but did not understand about us while they tallied-up big deficits for us to inherit, polluted the earth, invested in suburbia, perpetuated the warehousing of the poor black communities they supposedly liberated, and, etc, etc, etc; all while filling the airwaves with vitriol and brickbats on a reliably regular basis. Recently, it seems that the boomers have realized that we're not who they thought we were when they and Time magazine convicted us in the early 90's. I think the boomers have grown-up and evolved a lot since then. Hopefully we can all work together in the future to solve the many problems that we all face.
Posted by: hayden fisher | January 19, 2008 at 10:56 PM