>> revealing understanding of te nature of combat. many others like him had to give all of these were models that i have attempted to follow that i'm not a soldier. soldier. i'm the son of a soldier. my father was the united states army that served from korea to vietnam. i am ther therefore at least any brat. i often say if they had a

service within the colors would be black and blue. my son was a soldier in the first armored division, second lieutenant in command of the tank platoon which i'm confident is doing nothing to improve his driving skills. so while i've not been a soldier i've been close to the soldiers and in many respects have felt a sympathetic kean and tried to understand them and that experience of combat which in truth only they can relate, only which they can understand. i do this because i think it is important for the human experience and important also for american history to understand the greatness of those that have been the

soldiers. we are not a military people in our history we are the people of a republic. they are suspicious of military life. of ththe republic is democratic. military life we do not have kings and even in the 19th century there were americans who wonder why we had a standing army for them was this not a relic of dictatorship. nevertheless we did have a small one. a band of brothers. and these are the man who stepped forward to become leaders in the american civil war. the war which as churchill's head was the least avoidable of the great modern conflicts that had been known to this day.

they fought without malice in their hearts to each other. on any other occasion they would have bought each other drinks at the bar. but as soldiers they were loyal to the cause. i am not good enough to polish the. but i try to tell the tale. i would try to go on telling it because i believe we need to hear that story. i am glad for my fellow finalists and the work that they have done so moving and admirable. i want to say in the words of

another great english man who was himself of course a soldier let us go forward in our combined strength. thank you very much. [applause] >> it would seem to me almost an act of desecration to say anything after your eloquent statement. but i would observe this. if there is in the academy with the ignorance of or condescension to the study of military history, i wish its perpetrators could have been

here. thank you all very much. good evening. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you're watching booktv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. up next on booktv after words with jonathan and a senior writer at the weekly standard and author of what to expect when no one's expecting.

this week paul taylor and his latest book the next america boomers the one eagles and the generational showdown. the research dissector 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. >> guest: nice t >> guest: nice to be here. >> host: tell us about ida may fuller. >> guest: she was a never married legal secretary from vermont. the first person ever to receive a social security check in her retirement 1940 just after her 65th birthday. the number 0001 check and it was a monthly check for a little over $22. ida was clever enough to live 35

years. she died at age 100 in the course of those years the czechs kept coming an and in the end se had received something of $23,000 over the course of her retirement. that doesn't sound like much in today's dollars but if you look at what she had put into the system when she retired away 3-years-old she had only contributed for three years. what she put him in her employee or put in, ida got back a return on those investments, if you will those contributions, of 500 fold. she is the poster girl for a demographic reality about social security that's a very current today, which is the system with absolutely at its best for the generation it was very good for the next generation and on it goes. but by the time we fast-forward to 2014 is a big demographic trouble because way back then, we had 30, 40, 50 coming even

150 workers per retiree literally at first. it goes down precipitously and it gets 10-1 and 5-1, but by the time all of today's 65-year-old, the theme is tv boom generation who are crossing the threshold of aged 6 65 at the rate of -- rate of 10,000 today and will do so every day between now and 2030, when we get to the end of that we have just two workers for every retiree and the mass of the franklin d-delta roosevelt put into place doesn't work anymore. and unfortunately, we have today's young adults, the so-called millennial generation who are having a lot of trouble getting started in life because they come of age in a very hostile economy and they are putting money into a system to support a level of benefits for today's retirees that they have no realistic chance of getting when they themselve themselves o there needs to be a re- balancing of the social compact.

it's a very important challenge of difficult challenge for the country politically that it's all a socianot only social secud medical budget in the capital, it is by far the biggest thing to do but it is symbolically the purest statement in public policy we are all in this together. these are programs that affect everybody and the mass of the programs doesn't work if you start from either it becomes fronted a pretty dramatic change post-xhosa today's baby boomers, what is it like for them? >> guest: if you look at the social security alone or medicare, medicare was added in 1965 if you add most of today's baby boomers become out ahead. they went for return to the first-generation data. but they still get out ahead.

ask warily a lot of the years in good health she would get roughly half a million dollars and up that she and her employers over her working life she's been medium, she's the typical webpage may be about 380,000 the remainder of that is going to be picked up by today's and tomorrow's taxpayers. buthe today's 45-year-old archivist 25-year-old they are almost all into negative territory. >> host: at its heart the book is about a generational tension that is paused to be caused by the cost of entitlement. tell us about the american

generations currently bouncing around the country. >> guest: what i would say about in the book is i didn't start out to write a book about the generational equity. i started to write about demographics, social and political change. i worked at the pew research center. we do a lot of public opinions and research, we have a lot of demographers, political scientists, other social scientists, economists and we look at the trends. again political, social, economic. we look at it fo through lots of lenses that over the decades would be looking at him through the generational lens as quite fascinating because we are in the era of where the generation gaps seem to be unusually large. america has always had generation gaps because of the dynamic society and younger adults from their parents and grandparents but in this particular moment in these gaps across all of the dimensions that we are interested and have gotten very wide.

the largest of those gaps is racial and ethnic. we are now 40 or 50 years into the third grade emigration wave in the country's history. it began in the mid-60s when we passed legislation to open the borders having closed our borders back in the 1920s in reaction to the previous immigration and the way the border stayed close through the world war depression etc. we were able to open them up again but what is distinctive about this first of all an absolute numbers, more immigrants than the two previous put together although it is a shared population amount. but what is distinctive the first immigration going back to the late 19th and early 20th century line of ten of the immigrants were from europe and in this half are from latin america and nearly 30% are from asia only about 10% are from europe. so this is changing the complexion and the makeup and a

unaccounted on the path to become the majority from the century into 40s according to the census bureau the pretty dramatic change and for someone i'm about to turn 65 this year so i'm going into a country that is 85% white and i'm going to be looking at the countries that is 43% white. for people my age it is disoriented. for people my children and grandchildren's age, it is the only america they donated is the most natural thing in the world. it is out in lots of ways i start the book with the momentum on the night of presidential,'s reelection victory of 2012. i'm sort of interested in the election outcomes and i have a bad habit of trying to forecast them and it's about as reliable

as a coin flip. so by the number of really smart conservatives and republican political analysts, posters, commentators who really expected that romney to win that a bike shed and had no reason. we were in a terrible economy. unemployment was eight, nine, 10%. and yet obama not only one but he one pretty easily by 5 million votes. and the opening pages of the book sort of capture the commentary rush limbaugh establishment is no longer a majority and bill o'reilly was outnumbered. this was a moment i think where it is one of the political parties that realize the country that we thought we were running in that we thought we were going to win wasn't going to come out

and vote that day and they wound up getting just 17% of the vote. that doesn't bode well for the political party looking at the future change of the country. you asked about the generation. so if you play this out generationally if you start in the oldest generation, they are the most conservative generation politically and they are the so-called silent generation in the 40s and 50s. financially they are the most secure generation and a lot of the upheavals of the great recession. they were mostly able to escape and paid off the mortgages on their home into foreclosure it didn't affect them that much. many if not all of them were retired. they are very anxious frankly

about the changing complexion of the country. they are somewhat disoriented by the digital revolution and the wayofthe ways that people communicate. the next is tha that the rumorsn the 50s and 60s. the oldest is probably now 67. so they are on the cusp of retirement. they were a famous generation. my generation back in the 60s when they were the leaders of the counterculture, the women's rights, civil rights, antiwar. they were known as a generation of protesters and truth of that label never quite captured the full political breath of the generation. as i point out in the book they were able to vote in 1972. that happened to be the first time we lowered the voting age for the majority of the baby boomers in the 1972 election voted for richard nixon and bob hayes challenger.

nonetheless, they've become more conservative as they've gotten older and they are worried about their own finances as they head into retirement and if you look all the way to the assessment whether they are ready for the retirement or not it turns out that 40% or roughly half, most people say if you want to have the same lifespan on retirement in your working years you need to replace the 70, 80% of your income at the media and they are into position to replace 55, 60%. so it's not a cut lemon tea but there is a lot of nervousness. the next youngest generation is generation x. in their late 30s and 40s. they were worried about their retirement. they are sometimes said to be kind of the entrepreneurial loadeloaders that are distrustfn the institutions and the government and perhaps of the reagan revolution into the divorce revolution, the cultural messages that they got as they

grew up in the tough world out there to figure out their place and do what you can to make it best and finally the millennial's who are now in their mid teens to early 30s. they are the largest generation since the boomers. they've come into the workforce electorate with a loud noise not quite the social protest that we recall, but in their voting habits, they are the most liberal generation in modern history. so three, four, national elections in a row that they have much more democratic than that elders and a lot of it is the ethnic and racial profile in the generation is nonwhite and non- whites tend to be liberal. they tend to b be the leaders in that big government. and that plays out here.

they also have a terrible time getting started in life. a lot of them again they are ready to go into the workforce and it hasn't recovered from that so they have some of the largest unemployment rates of any generation starting out and we just got out a report earlier this month. they are so far we took a particular look at the oldest of the millennial's in the mid-20s to early 30s so presumably via vana, they are for their formal education and oddity of the workforce starting up their life. but if you look at the indicators of the economic well-being of today's indicators and you compare them with x-ers or boomers they are doing worse. they have over personal income, they have lower wealth. so they are in danger of becoming the first generation of modern history, perhaps in our

history of doing less well in life than their parents generation. that is at least how the story starts and it is the notion of the ever upwar upward generatiol mobility. >> host: you talking what about the millennial and boomers and even in the housing bubble can you talk about the effect of the housing bubble in the two groups? >> guest: sure. so the story of the housing bubble is well known an well-kne great run-up in prices the americans look around and for the typical american household, the value of your house is something like 75% of your total aggregate wealth. they use the value of their house. it seems like a great idea how the prices go up is into this is wonderful. we know what happens they

eventually burst. it had a terrible effect on the rest of the american economy into the financial markets seized up and everything goes into collapse and we know that aspect of the story tha but thes well known is how strong of the age there was to be aspect. if you think about the older adults by the time this burst. they enjoy the run-up to bristol ahead of the game and importantly most of them if youu talk about 60 to 70, 80-year-olds have paid off their mortgage so they were not in danger of going over the water and paying. if you think about today's 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, those that have purchased a calm and many had not but those that had almost all of them purchased at these prices and when the

bubble burst they are the ones that went underwater and that disproportionately faced foreclosure and have seen their wealth but wasn't all that high to begin with. so one statistic if you go back to 1984 and compared the wealth of the households headed by someone under the age of 35 versus the households headed by someone over the age of 65, the gap is about ten to one in favor of the folks at the upper edge and of the age group. by 2011, the gap had grown from ten to one to 26-1. and my guess we can look at that particular set of statistics but it's lost to the certainty that it has grown even more sense. so that is one of many indicators that suggest over the course some of this is driven by the housing bubble that was the great recession over the last five or six years but many of the patterns are decades old and

politically speaking, the old have been prospering relative to the young. that's not to say the older and the great financial there is a mix of people doing well and not well but better friend yesterday where they are doing well then yesterday is gone. >> host: so the book is about numbers which many of us are greatly appreciative for. and i would say every two or three pages there is a number that snaps your head back and one of them is i think it seems a little frivolous but this one set my head back this one is about tattoos. they have crept up in the generational america. >> guest: we did a survey that goes back four or five years now and we noticed and it's hard not to notice tattoos are more prevalent in the culture than they used to be. back in the day they were the body where sailors, strippers

and hookers and today they are totally mainstream and especially among the young sophie found 37% of all millennial's have a tattoo comparator i can't remember, five or 6% of the oldest generation and of the millennial's that have a tattoo one is often not enough. close to half of them had two or more into something like one in six have six or more. so i thin think that's one of te planes that are unique and maybe it is a stretch, but it seems reasonable to me that one of the things we try to do epicenter is stay i and draw inferences and t others speculate as to what may be going on. one of the things that has been said of the millennial generation is the look at me generation and tattoos are a sort of real-world manifestation of that. what would seem to be driving that is they are the first generation of digital natives that have grown up in a world where the most natural thing,

this is the way you live, you have this in your hand cut you click on it and if it exposes you to the world of information, it exposes you to your network of friends coming you can take a picture of herself, share it with your friends and all of these are alien to someone that is my age that many people have adapted to this end of a sor anf get how and how boring it is. but what makes the millennial's different is this is not something they'd have to adapt to. this is all they have ever known it. someone describes this as a generation where the message this sends is that the world can revolve around you because if you have a picture of your sulfated is kind of cool or kind of funny, you know, maybe some of your best friends look at it. maybe it goes viral. i have picked out a story that i saw in a british newspaper for three or four years until i had just two years ago the most

successful youtube video that had gotten as of the end of last year something like 500 million hits was a video called my key bit my finger and it was of a 1-year-old "afte mikey being fey his 3-year-old brother hairy and it's a very attractive family scene and so he bites hairy's finger and then we watch him dissolve into tears. he looks betrayed into that's pretty much it. and the one piece of dialogue is ouch. and that goes for 57 seconds. but it's heartrending. 500 million people watch it and these young british lads now have their own fan clubs and have become celebrities. there was a sense in which every young adults today i can become a celebrity.

the people who want to see my funny cat videos or want to see when i jumped on my backyard trampoline for a million other iterations of that and i do think it gives today's young adults who i think they have been dealt a worse hand economically than they know because again this is the only hand they have ever had, so when people my age say you have it pretty tough it doesn't make much sense to them. when we ask about their economic confidence, they are the most confident of any generation. maybe this is lifecycle how they tend to be in the principle, but i think some of it, and i do that we are straying far from tattoos but some of it is this sense i can be the center of the universe. the world is interested in me. i can purchase the veto publish a story about myself and i think this is an antiwar generation. >> host: i wonder how many tattoos mikey has by now.

[laughter] to the generations switch places. what happens to the age structure of the american population? >> guest: we are getting older than we have ever been before. is it, the median age today is something like 37. by the middle of the century it will be 41. that doesn't sound all that dramatic and if we stand back a little bit what we can observe around the world as almost every country in the world is getting older than it has ever been before. and in terms of us the use it aa combination of two things. it's a combination of the rising longevity in the 19 hundreds there's a baby born in america. at an average lifespan of 47 years. today it is a lie delete lifespan of 84 years. a lot of those in vancouver you can advance pence had to do with sanitation, public health, driving down the high death rate of incidence to infectious

diseases. most of the more recent have to do with extending the life of older adults and some people think that it would be we haven't seen anything yet. there is a computer chip that will be embedded. all of our bodily systems will keep going indefinitely but whether or not we get to that future there is a chapter in the book that sort of gets to that we are getting older and every country in the world is getting older and it is a combination of longer lifespans but longer lifespans throughout human history get a lower fertility rates because in the old days people have a lot of kids because they were not sure all of them would survive if you had kids because you needed someone to take care of you when you got older. the message now is kids are expensive and there aren't that many family farms that need attending in new york city or shanghai or mexico city so birth

birthrates have plummet through the world and there is a debate among demographers for most of the history of the demographers dug up the most attention that we are headed for an overcrowded future and there will be massive starvation and it's going to be very grim. now there are still some who believe that and still some that worry about the sustainability of the earth resources and in the world tha that has to date 7 million inhabitants and by the end of the century is likely to have between ten to 11 million. but understand that the growth rate of 50% in this century is way down from the fourfold growth rate so this has to do with declining birth rates. whether or not it is good o thar bad for humanity in the long haul it poses challenges for countries like the united states that have a large cohort of baby boomers heading into retirement

making claims on social security and medicare and smaller in the workforce paying taxes to support them now this is a challenge. although we have a pretty dysfunctional political system it is hard for us to tackle these things but it is an even bigger challenge in most of the world's other advanced countries. so we are headed for the median age of 41 by the midcentury. i then china will be 46. they had a one child policy for decades now, and it's completely changed. germany would be 51. japan would be 53. so there are a lot of the advanced economies in the world that are looking at the relationship of older people to younger people. the challenge of a society is that people don't have the energy committee ingenuity to the imagination.

we respect them and want them to live out their last years and dignity and all the rest that you don't want an economy if you are looking at it from that point of view because you are much better off in the vitality that comes with you. >> host: so the book isn't all mad max and one of the other sides with what has been going on particularly in the great recession is that as you pointed out from the numbers it has fostered this renewed dependen dependency. can you tell us a little bit about that? test code one of the things that tries to do is to play off the challenges and the public policy. for reengineering of the compact between young and old and not do something on social security and medicare. but also, let's look at that same social context in the confines of the family, which is

some ways it is the original social safety net and it is the place where the most important intergenerational exchange is happening and has been happening since the beginning of time. here it you do have a pretty attractive story. again in the old days the paradigm was the border between the generation was i take care of you when you are young and you take care of me when i'm old, everybody wins. in the 20th century the united states and most other countries build a safety net for people because it was the reaction to the industrial age which saw some circumstances and who can build a floor beneath them. so, when fdr pushed forward, social security into the mid-1930s and develop the great depression. but by far the poorest people in the country. and so the notion was all right.

so we built the social safety net for the old, and that in some ways relieved of the burden if you will of young adults and middle-age adults for caring for their parents. and everybody loves that and if you go back 100 or 150 years, the idea that many generations living under the same roof with sort of the norm particularly if you go back to th the editor ara and societies at all the rest but in the course of the 20th century we moved away from that and we are playing out in the house in the suburbs and you come visit on sundays and everybody wins. so the number of families living at the many generations went down, down, down and for the last 30 years it has come back up and it particularly came back up four or five years ago when we got hit with a great

recession and there was a big housing component so you have people losing their homes and one of the most famous lines in poetry is from robert frost that is 100-years-old and has a relevance today. home is the place when you have to go there you have to take you in. so in today's economy, you have more than 50 million americans living in the multi-generational family households and that includeincludes a lot of millens that are getting started in life and that includes middle-age folks that crapped out in one way or another. they lost their job, lost their homes, it includes elderly parents that can't take care of themselves and it moves in all directions but it's a story that basically says the generations of modern america not only aren't at each other's throats, but the way that they were frankly when the boomers came of age 30 or 40 years ago they like each other and they got along well and the belief in helping each other out. post co. and with that, we will take a break.

how did you come to be so interested in the demographics? >> guest: i worked at newspapers covering the national politics and had an assignment in south africa during the historical transition. the politics are interested in numbers and who votes and who doesn't. always interested in demographics as well and started a family deep in the "washington post" and we can see the family changing which is fascinating.

but by the last ten years i've been at the pew research center. we call ourselves a fact tank and its social science, public opinion research but also a lot of demographers and we tell stories with numbers. so we generate our own with our own surveys and they look at the census data. we have a lot of very serious pathologists who understand how to find the data and how to understand that it is rigorous and high-quality and then we have storytellers like myself who try to turn the numbers into stories. what we don't do, and i miss it sometimes, our story is about america for the numbers. they are not -- we have a chapter that we tell a story and we gave her a different name. she is a millennial and for the most part, it is a number that eliminate and sheds light but it

may not be for everybody. it is a little bit bloodless. they are not running and breathing human beings. we hope there is empirical data that can back it up and therefore it does help. here we are at the beginning of this with amazing changes going on at all realms of our life and politics in the social norms to our families and economics. let's look at the numbers to find out how we got here and while the book doesn't do a lot of predicting it does say there's parts of the future that we already know some of the parts by the demographics and the data and by that it does look forward to the middle of the century. >> host: one of the most interesting sections of the book

has opened up over the last 30 years. years. tell us what is going on with marriage. >> guest: first is market share over the age of 18 were married and today 51% of all of the adults are married. that is a huge, huge change in a relatively short hair coat of time and the institution has been around for thousands and thousands of years as an institution that is almost every society throughout over human history. and this amount of the generation has lots of customers if you will is unprecedented. so what's going on and where is it coming from? by far the biggest drop-off is s that the lower enat the lower ee socioeconomic scale. go back 40 or 50 years and people with more education and higher income and people with less educational incomes a rate of roughly the same rate. there is an indoor mass. gap.

if you understand where the loss is coming from is three things. money and i can't remember the third. we ask adults of all ages and income levels adult education levels, how important is it to have a good financial future in order to be a good prospective husband or wife. the people who are most likely to say that it's very important or people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. the market share and overwhelming of course adults want to get married and it is an important thing in their life priority but then when you ask what does it take to be a good potential partner for folks with less income say it takes money. so in effect they are setting the bar for marriage that they themselves across.

so it has kind of a circular effect because marriage for most in history as an economic arrangement at a very successful arrangement. you have children and they support over the lifecycle of the day do cost at the beginning of the lifecycle. with so if the folks at the lower and do not enter into that, they are deprived of the economic benefits and blonde would add i think there is a psychological benefit. the commitment itself is a socio- economic with the attributes that are associated in the economic success. you have to have a new thing for compromise and for saving for tomorrow and all the rest. so come a very vivid fact of modern life is an increase in income and wealth inequality driven by the changing structure of the global economy, by the

digital revolution. this has fed into their marriage gap as well as the lower end of the marketplace if you will. there is a market mismatch. men have done less well than women adapting to the economy. if you have nearly 60% of all undergraduates are women and we ask these kind of questions about their life priority, the young women have higher career aspirations and young men. they are particularly notable in the community. the marriage rates among black about 30% of young black adults are buried and black men some are doing extremely well but many are not into the high level of incarceration. something is missing in the marriage market in those communities and other communities of low income.

so, you have got cultural change being fed by economic change and probably reinforcing the society. >> host: so you have the cornerstone of that. do we know when the shift in perception is about the function of marriage emerged. it is a capstone events by which it means others have studied this. when you have all of the rest of your ducks in a row first you want to get a career. i degette has been driven by the change in the economy, the decline of economic opportunity at the lower end of the socioeconomic skills so go back 40 or 50 years at the high school degree you as a young man

starting out at a reasonable prospect. those sort of on ramps into the middle class are not as available as they used to be. our economy is like an hourglass visa days with our lower end jobs that don't offer that much advanced without much hope into the middle-class lifecycle but fewer in between. so there is what is driving the current decline. there is a longer-term change in marriage with the scholars point going back a couple hundred years which is the notion of individual fulfillment as the purpose of marriage. for most of the history it was an economic arrangement. it's the best place to raise

kids and they help secure your economic future. companionship and lifetime soulmate comes in and when we ask today's adults what is the point of getting married and what is the most important reason, love is always at the top of the list. love is a wonderful thing but it has introduced a kind of fragile element in the heart of this institution. the voice rates are now not quite as high as they were 20 or 30 years ago but nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. and it's not quite -- it remains to be seen whether it is as sturdy for this institution as economic self-interest has been. one of the interesting things going back to the generational component is the latest uptick is occurring among older adults and historically the marriage is

that the greatest risk of divorce o or new marriages, youg marriage in particular if you get married very young you have a higher chance of getting divorce. today there has been a spike in older divorce with a couple of age 50 or mor more more for thex amplified by two or three years ago the breakup of the 40 year marriage you figure you have worked out the kinks of the marriage but now it is to be something like only one out of ten were among people 50 and older and now it is down to about one in four and interestingly it is the boomers that were part of the divorce revolution 30 or 40 years ago and their marriages were also part of the divorce revolution. there are those that say part of what's going on is that couples

in their 50s and 60s first of all the are in good health and there's a lot left out there for me to do that i want to do. the kids are out from underneath in many cases they would've been had kids that boomerang back home. and maybe the marriage is on scale and i don't want to settle and there's something better for me and there is a cultural debate over whether the divorce at the end of the day is a good thing or bad thing. we ask questions of the public about this. and in terms of the changing family structure is, the public is actually living that label about the divorce and if you ask the public what better the divorce is never a happy outcome, but is it better to stay in a bad marriage or to get a divorce, most of the public would say if it was a lousy marriage, get out. the real concern about the public about the fact that so many fewer adults are married these days has to do with the

extraordinary rise in birth outside of marriage. marriage. so again you go back 40 or 50 years, 5% of all of the new were born to a single mother. today 41% of all newborns are board to a single mother in on this front the american public is very concerned because they don't need the sociologists or economists to tell them what they know in their gut is true that if you were born to a single parent, your chances for having a happy outcome in life are low grade that doesn't mean that you are doomed by any means another are not here like single mothers and fathers doing great stuff. but if you look at the numbers out the correlation between poor into a single parent and raised by a single parent into poverty anand povertyand unhappy outcome children is pretty high. >> host: since we are here on single-parent good, you are admirably respectful in the book as you always are.

you talk about bad outcomes. tell me about some of them. what are the bad actors? >> guest: i think more than half of all children in poverty today are in a single-parent household. so, i mean that is the strongest correlation. there are other psychological correlations i don't want to stretch my credentials on. i'm not an expert of children of divorce who are not raised by both parents there is a tendency to have a higher level of psychological problems as one is growing up. one of these quotes says there are a lot of countries by the way in the world where the rape marriage rates have plummeted. this isn't just an american phenomena. if you look the marriage rates are even lower than they are here, much lower. but in norther northern europe,e cohabitation has all but replaced marriage.

it is the case that america is unique in the degree to which non- marriage and high divorce, a teenager in this country has less of a chance of being raised by both biological parents than any other country in the world, and that child and young adult experience may lead to difficult outcomes. but i would add one more thing that i think is important to keep in mind because people that have been watching this family breakup for this family and on formation unfolded the last 40 or 50 years and you can go back to the way mayhem reports that became famous depending on your perspective, he focused on the black family committee was very concerned and he said a lot of the programs are not going to work because we have a black familfamily, this was considerea scandalous number back then where the out of wedlock is 25% and that was a shocking thing

that i got in the report that said that. today it is 71% and it is 29 or 30%. so there has been a change here. it is worth pointing out however, that the negative social outcomes that many people said the consequences that would spring forth by the largest have not happened. and if you look at most of the indicators that we look at for the well-being of children, high school dropout rates college i became meant, crime and other behaviors in fact the lions are going in a positive direction. so that speaks to something that i think a number of the parts of the book go to switches the old family is it hasn't completely

disappeared, but it's certainly lost its cultural hegemony. there are now many family farms from single parent talks a lot about the mixed-race family, same-sex families, stepfamilies, many types, and there is in all of this able class for concern because many are fragile but there is an extraordinary amount of resilience. all americans and whatever the family circumstance continued to place family at the absolute center of their lives and they build a kinshibuilt a kinship nd whatever family they have great guess it works better for some people than others, but the fact that it is in trouble doesn't mean that other things have not come along and replace them. they have. the last thing i would say that i was totally fascinated by is we now have advertisers showing the family forms that which would have shocked the american public ten, 20 to 30 years ago.

so the state of their ads that ran earlier this year on the olympics and in the super bowl are celebrating the new families into the images in the commercial that is sort of the this is the american apple pie is mixed-race families, it's same-sex families, and again, this goes back to the generational difference. this is the new america and young adults. comfortable with these kinds of arrangements. older adults are a little bit more concerned. >> host: before we leave the topic of marriage, is marriage good for people? >> guest: yes. and i can say that in. we. we ask people -- we have what we call one of the door opener questions that we ask just to get people warmed up is taught me how happy are you these days

are you somewhat happy or not very happy and we've asked over many years and then we have fascinating correlations, what type of people say they are happy and that they are not. and then you can do a statistical regression to say well, you know, is this group happy because of this demographic characteristic or that? poll after poll married people are happier than unhappy people. so, discuss among yourselves. is it because they get married or because married people are happy to come and it's not -- it is probably both as is often the case with causation and correlation and all the rest. but there is no question as i said earlier that it is associated with positive economic incomes and people who do well financially or happier than people that don't do well themselves so there is a reinforced set of corollaries

here. >> host: and this is after other factors, right clicks >> guest: i'm out of my realm but i know enough to talk about the methodologies it's called multiple regression analysis, so we look at the correlation between happiness, marriage and happiness and we control for all of those other factors we just identified the impact of marriage on happiness and we can say that married people i think the figure is 12% more likely than unmarried people to be happy. most other things we look at and you control for all those factors washes away the rate of there are not many things that stand up to the type of regression. one of the things it does is religiosity. people who are very religious and regular are happier than other people almost equal. income as well. >> host: you have a great line where you say we are accumulating more and more to

whom we owe less and less. what does that mean? >> guest: that goes back to the nuclear family that has now given way to all sorts of families step and blended and broken and make us. and i think it is an open question as to how well that family serves the people in it over the course of their lifestyles and when i use that quote it was in the context of the boomers that are now the first generation in our history to head into the older age having gone through some of the turbulence in their family lives, the high divorce rates and all the rest. so going back to the old rabbi and i take care of you when you are young and i take care of you when you are old. suppose he has fathered some children have a hasn't been particularly involved in the lives of those children into somsouth 65, 70-years-old and doesn't have that strength and intergenerational relationship

and he falls down and breaks his hip. he doesn't have a 50-year-old daughter that is going to worry about him the way that he might if he were part of her life for the first 50 years of her life. so there is a phrase we have now coming into the old age is a higher number of elderly orphans who don't have those sorts of intergenerational family ties and it's one of those things that sociologists are beginning to look at. this is a sort of needs further study. it's in that realm but it is an interesting development. >> host: people may not realize that we are more of a church country than we were at the founding. can you sketch out briefly a path in america? >> guest: it has been a part of our dna from the beginning. it's when the pilgrims came because they wanted to practice

their brand of christianity. we have been distinct in our religion and it was de tocqueville to put his best most famous early visitor who remarked in the century helped develop americans were and how seriously they took religion but they didn't seem to mind if their neighbors had false versions of their faith. so we have our own that if you see that in the founding documents everybody has the right to pursue any religion that he or she wants to impose a religion on the public as a whole, so these instincts have led to over the course of the 19th century as a young country and to settle her country we didn't have that many institutions but they've both been out very quickly to keep them out of the 20th century but

through any advanced industrialized country. the modernity leads to the secularism and you see that certainly in europe where you have these enormous anti-cathedrals as they are in memory of the importance of religion once placed in the society and no longer does. in america the situation is somewhat different. we remain very pluralistic. one of the things however that has begun to have been -- and there is a chapter in the book called the rise of the nones ate gaining what is your religion and the response is none. it doesn't mean that you are atheist or agnostic about 20% of the public, 33% of millennial's have no religion. about a quarter of the group say that. it simply means that they are

not -- they don't choose to be affiliated with any denomination therefore they are not churched if the will. most of them believe in god and many of them still pray and say they are spiritual in some way that a rising share o the risine young adults are uncomfortable with organized religion. ..