>> john taylor is reading why growth matters, how economic growth in india produces poverty and lessons for other developing countries. the presentation from the council on foreign relations can be viewed on booktv.org anytime. if there is another institution whose reading list you would like to here, send us an e-mail at td.org. >> up next on booktv, "after words" what guest host jonathan last and author of what to expect when no one is expecting. this week paul taylor in his latest book the next america.

in the the pew research director examines how the demographic changes in america are likely to shake u.s. culture this program is about one hour. >> thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me. >> tell me about ida b. fuller. >> well, he was from vermont in the first person to receive security check after 1940. and it was a monthly check for little over $22. ida b. fuller is covered have to live for another 22 years in the course of his 35 years the tax cut coming it doesn't sound like

much in today's dollars and one she retired chinle contributed for three years. and she got back a return of a concert contribution. which is that the system is that it's absolutely the best for the first first-generation and very good for the next generation as well. so it isn't the demographic trouble because way back then we had 30, 40, nifty, even 150 workers per retiree. then it goes down precipitously

and we have the rate of 10,000 per day 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. in the math doesn't work anymore. unfortunately we have today's young adults, the so-called millennial generation who is having a lot of trouble getting darted because they have come of age in a very hostile economy. they are paying money into a system to support a level of benefits for today's retirees, but they have no realistic chance of they themselves are tiring. so there needs to be a rebalancing of the social contract. it's a difficult challenge for this country politically. not only does social security and medicare behalf of our

budget but it's by far the biggest thing that we do. but it is symbolically the pure statement in public policy that as a country we are a community and we are all in this together. these are the programs that affect everyone. in the old math of the programs doesn't work. so it is a pretty shamanic thing. >> so ida got a lot more than she put into the system. what is it like from today's baby boomers? >> if you look at social security alone were social security and medicare, medicare was added by lbj, if you added today they still come out ahead. they don't get nearly the windfall returns that the first-generation did. but they still get out ahead. a prototypical baby boomer who retires in 2014, we will call her jane smith. if she lives and she was

actuarially allotted 20 years in good health, she will get roughly a half million dollars in benefits from social security and medicare. and that she and her employers over her working life, and again she is maybe about 380,000. and the remainder of that is going to be picked up by today's and tomorrow's taxpayers. but the trouble is if you fast-forward not to today's 25-year-olds, they're almost always in negative territory. they will pay more in over the course of their lifetimes than they will get back. >> and so your book is about this generational tension by specifically this question on entitlements. can you tell us all a bit more about that american generations currently bounce around the country? >> sure. i didn't start out to write a book about generational equity.

but about demographic and social political change. i work at the pew research center and that is what we do. a lot of public opinion research. demographers, political scientist, economist. and we sort of look at trends. again, political, social, economic. we look at it through these lenses. over the decade looking at this is quite fascinating. because we are in an era where the generation gap seems unusually large. american a people have always had a dynamic society and we always have younger adult who see this differently than their grandparents and parents. when the particular moment occurs in these gaps across all dimensions that have gotten very large, the largest of those gaps is racial and ethnic and we are now 40 or 50 years into the third grade immigration wave in

our countries history. it began in the 60s when we passed legislation to open the borders, having close the borders back in the 1920s in reaction to the previous immigration wave in the border state closer world wars and depressions et cetera. but what is distinctive about this is absolute numbers, more immigrants than the two previous waves put together. and what is really distinctive is the first one was goes back to the late 19th and early in 20th century. nine out of 10 were from europe. in this way have are from latin america, nearly 30% are from asia. only about 10% are from europe. so this is definitely changing the racial complexion and we are now a country that is on a path before the middle of this century according to the census

bureau. so pretty dramatic change. for someone my age, and i'm actually one of those that are his about turn 65 this year, and born into a country that is 85% white and i'm going to be looking at a country that is 43% white. so for people my age it is disorienting. for people at my children and grandchildren sage comment the only america that they've known in the most natural thing in the world. so i started the book on the night of president obama's reelection victory in 2012 or if i'm an old political reporters sort of interested in what is going to happen with the election outcome and i used to have a bad habit of trying to forecast it. and so i was really struck on election night by the number of really smart conservative and republican political analyst and

pollsters who were flummoxed in the outcome and who really expected that romney would win that election. and they have a lot of reason to expect that. we had four years of a terrible economy. eight, nine, 10%. but obama actually one pretty easily. by 5 million votes and the opening pages of the book sort of capture the commentary of rush limbaugh, those with dave at though part of this is no longer the majority. it and so it is very interesting when we see what is going on here.

[inaudible] >> so they think conservatives are much of their lives and financially there actually are most secure generation in the lot of the upheaval of the great recession, they were mostly able to escape. most of them have paid off the mortgages on their homes. all of that foreclosure in what has been in effect a great deal. many were retired but didn't have jobs. nonetheless, they are very anxious frankly about the changing complexion of the country. they are somewhat disappointed by the digital revolution in the way that people communicate. the next generation is the boomers in their 50s and 60s. and so they are on the cusp of retirement. they are a famous generation back in the 60s when they were

the leaders of the counterculture. the women's rights, the civil rights. they were a generation known as a generation of protesters. although they never quite capture the full political portion of the generation. the first election they were able to vote was 1972. i happen to that happened to be the first election when we've lowered the voting age. one actually a majority of boomers in that election voted for richard nixon and nonetheless they have become more conservative as they have gotten older. they are worried about their own finances as they head into retirement. if you look at all the ways whether we are ready for retirement or not, roughly half of the people are not prepared. most people say if you want to have the same lifestyle in retirement in your working

years, you need to replace 70 or 80% of your income. so it is not a calamity. but there's a lot of nervousness. >> the next youngest generation is the transport is generation. they are worried about their retirement. they are said to be the savvy entrepreneurial loners. they are distrustful of institutions and government and perhaps of the reagan revolution in the divorce revolution. as they grew up, they believe it's a tough world out there. they believe in doing what you can to make it better. and finally the millennial center now in their teenagers to their early '30s. they're the largest generation since the baby boomers and have come into the workforce with a

loud noise. not quite the social protest that we recall from the baby boomers. but in their voting habits they are most liberal generation in modern history. where they have had a much more democratic situation. there is a voting gap that is as large as ever today. a another part is their racial and ethnic profile. they tend to be liberal. they tend to be believers and the government. and that plays out here as well. they are also having a terrible time getting the word and a lot of them are very ready to go into the workforce and it hasn't fully recovered from now. and they've had some of the largest unemployment rates of any generation. we put a report earlier this month.

so far we took a look at the oldest of the millennial is in her mid-20s to early '30s. presumably by then they are through their formal education and than they are in the workforce and starting up their lives. but if you look at all of these indicators of today's millennial is and compare them with baby boomers or gen-x generation, they have higher rates of poverty and personal income and they are in danger of becoming the first generation in modern history, perhaps in history of doing less well in life than their parents generation did. we don't know how their story ends, but that is how the story is starting. and so that is where we start to chip away at the american creed with this notion of the ever upwards generational mobility. >> you talk a lot about this wealth gap between the

millennial's and the baby boomer generation. and you talk about the effect of the housing bubble. >> sure. >> the story of the housing bubble is well known. great run-up in prices and americans looked around and the typical american household, the value of your house or something like only 5% of your total aggregate wealth. and people said, my goodness, i've gotten rich. people ran up a lot of debt, they use the value of their house to finance current consumption. seems like a great idea because housing prices went up and they thought it was wonderful. so we knew it was happening in 2006 and had a terrible effect on the economy and financial markets eased up and we sort of know that aspect of the story. but then there is a strong portion to that story and if you

think about older adults, most of them by the time the bubble bursts, most of them have purchased their homes at these prices. they enjoy the run up but even when everything came down they were still ahead of the game and importantly most of them, if you talk about 60, 70, 80-year-olds, they were not in danger of going under water with foreclosure and all the rest. so if you think about today's 20-year-olds were 30-year-olds, those that have purchased a home in many had and, almost all of them could have bubble inflated prices and they are the ones who went under water when the bubble burst, they were the ones who have seen their wealth, which wasn't all that high to begin with and operate. so if you go back to 1984 and compare the well, all households under the age of 35 versus those

headed by someone over the age of 65. the gap is about 10 to one in favor of this upper end. so people accumulate wealth as they grow older. by 2011 that gap had grown 26 to one and my guess is that it had grown over the last year with statistics and it's almost a certainty in many ways. so that's one of many indicators that suggest that over the course of many decades some of it is driven by the housing bubble and the great recession of the last five or six years and many of these patterns are decades old and relatively speaking the old have been prospering relative to the young enough not to say that there's a mix of people doing well or not doing well. but today's are doing better than yesterdays weird today's young are doing worse than yesterdays not. >> so your book the next

america, it saps your head back in appreciation. and he said that one is tattoos and how they've crept up in the generations? >> yes, we did a survey. tattoos are more prevalent in the culture than it used to be. as i wrote in the book, back in the day sailors, hookers, strippers, those were who had them. but today it is prevalent among the young. we found 37% of all moneyless have a tattoo. i think it's five or 6% in the oldest generation. and one is also not enough. close to half have two or more

and i think something like one in six have six or more. so one of the points that i make, and maybe it's a stretch but it seems reasonable to me. they try to stay with the numbers and draw a reasonable inference and let others speculate as to what may be going on. one thing that has been said of the millennial generation is that they already look at this as a manifestation of that. what seems to be driving at is that they are the first generation of digital natives. they grow upwards the most natural thing -- this is the way you live. you have this thing in your hand and you click on it and it exposes you to a world of information into your network of friends you can share with your friends. all of these things are alien to someone who is my age that many

people my age have adapted to this and they sort of get how empowering it is. what makes the millennial is different is that this is not something that they have to adapt to. it's all they've ever known. someone described it as a copernican generation where the message that this sends a the world revolves around you. so if you put up a picture of yourself in that kind of all or kind of funny, maybe it goes viral. i picked out a story that i saw in a british news editor and it looked like the most successful youtube video, something like 500 million hit is what it. and it was a video of a 1-year-old sitting in the high chair being fed by his 3-year-old brother, harry, and it is a very interesting family

seemed until mikey bikes the finger at harry. then we watch harry dissolved into tears. he looks betrayed and that's pretty much it. one piece of dialogue is out and that goes for 57 seconds. in 500 million people watch it. and so now these young british and vigils have their own fan clubs and have become celebrities. but the sense in which to every young adult today, i can become a celebrity. we are watching a funny cat videos order if i jump on my trampoline and took a self picture. i do think it gives today's young adults, and they have been dealt a worse hand economically than they know, and people my

age say that you got a pretty tough, it doesn't make that much sense to them. when we asked them about their economic confidence, there the most competent of any generation. maybe this is the lifecycle of young adults. but i think some of this -- some of it is a sense that i can be the center of the universe. i can publish the story of myself and are interested in me. and that is empowering. and i think this is an empowering generation. >> so after the generations shift, what happens to the age structure of the american population? >> we are getting older than we have ever been before. so it's something like 37. by the middle of the century it will be 41. it doesn't sound all that

dramatic and if we stand back a little bit, what we can observe is that almost every country in the world is getting older than it's ever been before. and it's a combination of two things. a combination of rising longevity. in 1900 a baby had an average lifespan of 47 years. today a baby born have an average lifespan of 79 years and so a lot of these advancements in the first half of the 20th century had to do it sanitation, public health, driving down the appallingly high death rate of infancy. most of the more recent advances have to do with extending the life of older adults and their are some who are saying that we haven't seen anything yet. as a computer chip in all of our hourly systems will keep on going indefinitely. but whether or not we get to

that and whether that is dystopia or nirvana, we are getting older and every country in the world is getting older. it's a combination of longer lifespans and longer lifespans to get lower fertility rates. in the old days people have a lot of kids. you had him because he didn't know if they would survive through infancy. but that was today headteacher governor older. but now you don't need to do that. there are not many family farms in the tending in new york city or mexico city. but the birth rates have plummeted throughout the world. and there's a big debate among demographers. for most of history those that got the most attention at we are headed for an overcrowded future there will be mass starvation and it's going to be very grim.

but now there are some who worry about the sustainability of the resources in the world that has today 7 million inhabitants and are likely to have between 10 and 11 million. but understand that that growth rate of 50% in this century is actually way down from the 20th century. this has to do with a declining birthrate. whether or not that's good or bad for humanity and the long haul, it poses challenges for countries in the short-haul like the united states to have this large number are baby boomers heading into retirement and a smaller cohort in the workforce paying taxes to support them. in the map simply doesn't work. now, this is a challenge that is not a solvable challenge and it's very hard for us.

but it is an even bigger challenge in most of the world's other advanced countries and so we are headed towards the median age of 41 by mid-country. i then they had a one child policy per decade and it's completely changed with the hp are met. germany will be 51 and japan will be 53. there are lot of advanced economies looking at uncharted waters in terms of the relationship of older people to younger people. and the challenge with an older society is that older people don't have the energy or the imagination. they are wonderful. we want them to live out their lasser's indignity and all the rest. the you don't want an economy driven by this necessarily. you're much better off with the vitality.

>> it's very dire sounding, but it's really not about old geezers. one of the upsides, what has been going on is that as you point out it is often renewed and are generational dependency. can you tell us about that? two yes, one of the other thing the book tries to do using data is to play off the challenges in our public policy for reengineering the between young and old. and also let's look at that same thing in the confines of a family which in some way is the original social safety net and the place where the most important intergenerational exchanges happen and have been happening since the beginning of time. so here i think you do have a pretty attractive story. in the old days the paradigm was that i take care of you when

you're young, you take care of me when i'm old. everybody wins. in the 20th century the united states and most other advanced countries have a social safety net because they are able to react to the industrial age which saw some people who didn't have families who could meet them. so when fdr pushed forward, social security in the middle of the great depression, by far the poorest were old people. so we need the government to do the things that families themselves cannot do. and so in some ways that relieves the burden, if you will, of young adult and middle aged adult preparing further older parents. and everybody loves that. if you go back on hundred or 150 years, the idea of many

generations living under the name roof was sort of than one. particularly if you go back to family farms and all the rest. but then in the course of society we've moved away from that. we raise a kid, you come visit on sundays and everybody wins. and so the number of families living many generations under the same roof went down. but around 30 years ago, stopped going down for the last 30 years has come back up in a and particularly came back up for five years ago when we got hit with the great recession and there was a big housing component in that. you have millions of people losing jobs and their homes and one of the most famous lines in poetry is from robert frost. home is the place where you have to go there that they have to take you in. so in today's economy now have

more than 50 million americans living in multi-generational family households. that includes a lot of millennialist kicked it started in life, those who are in one way or another lost her job and her home. it includes elderly parents can take care of themselves anymore. so it's a story that basically says that but the generations are not only at each other's throats, but they like each other, they got along well, and they believe in helping each other out. >> with that, we are going to take a quick break. >> are you on the go? "after words" is available via podcast through itunes. click on podcast on the upper left side of the page and select which podcast you would like to download and listen to us when you travel.

>> so how did you come to be so interested in demographics? >> well, i'm a former reporter and i spent 25 years working in national politics. and in politics are interested in numbers and vote and always interested in demographics as well. i started with a family beach 25 years ago i could see the family changing. in the last 10 years we call ourselves a fact tank. again it is social science, public opinion research and also a lot of demography and we tell this to generate our own surveys. and we look at census data and

we have a lot of very serious methodology to understand how to understand the data and to make sure that it is high quality. and then we have storytellers like myself. but we don't do, and this is sometimes -- are stories about america are told in numbers. i concocted one prototypical boomer and there is one other chapter where he actually have a real person and we gave her a different name. and we describe her in this way. but for the most part the book is a lot of numbers that we hope to illuminate and shed light. but it may not be for everyone. it's a little bit loveless. but i hope it compensates because only say something we hope that there is empirical data that can back it up and therefore it does help.

it's to say, here we are. amazing changes going on. in all realms of our life from politics to social wants to families to economics. and based upon ,-com,-com ma while the book doesn't do a lot of this, it does say that there are parts of the future that we already know. and based on that it does look towards the middle of the century. >> real people are totally overrated. so one of the most interesting sections of the book. the section about marriage. a big marriage gap has opened up in america over the last 30 years. can you tell us what is going on with marriage? two things are going on. marriage is losing market share is. if you go back to 1960, 70% of all adults over the age of 18 were married. today, 51% of all adults are married. that's a huge change in marriage

as an institution has been around for thousands of years. it's an institution that has been in almost every society throughout human history. and this amount of deterioration is unprecedented. so the second thing to say is by far the biggest drop-off, the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. you go back 40 or 50 years and people with more education and higher income and less education and income marry at roughly the same rate. and so if you try to understand where this loss of marriage is coming from, i quote an old joke about politics. things, money and i can't remember the third. so we asked adults of all ages and income levels how important

is it to have a good financial future in order to be a good live husband or wife. the people that are most likely to say that it's very important our people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. despite this loss of market share, the overwhelming number, of course they want to get married. and of course it is an important white or wordy. but then when you ask more, they say it takes money. so they are setting the bar for marriage that they themselves can't cross. and this has a kind of circular effect. because marriage is an economic arrangement and a very successful one. you allocate labor. you have children, they help support the family over the course of their lifetimes so if

the folks at the lower end are encouraged by, they are deprived of the economic benefits and i think there is a psychological benefit and the marital commitment itself associated with the attributes which are part of economic success. so you have to have an instinct of compromise and constancy. we are saving for tomorrow and all the rest. so with very vivid fact of modern life as an increase of income of wealth inequality. probably driven by the changing structure of the global economy and this has been a part of this in the marriage gap as well. certainly the lower end of the marriage market place. there is a marriage mismatch. men have done better than women adapting. and we're now in an era for nearly 60% of all undergraduates

are women. and so when you ask young women and young men about their life priorities, young women have higher career aspirations and young men. so it's particularly notable in the minority community. marriage rates among blacks, about 60% of black adults were married years ago. today a 30% are. black men have had trouble, some are doing well, but many are not. higher levels of incarceration. something is tampering with the marriage market in those communities and in other areas as well. so you have cultural change being fed by economic change and probably reinforcing this in society. >> so you're talking about marriage becoming more of a capstone event been a cornerstone event by max. >> yes. >> do we know when this shift in perception emerged?

>> i think the notion by which others have studied this, it's what you do we have all the rest of your ducks in a row. so first you want to get a career. and so i think it has been driven by the change in the economy and the decline of economic opportunity. so you go back 40 or 50 years with just a high school degree and you're going to start out of getting a good job and having a reasonably steady wage. both on grounds are not as available as they used to be. our economy is a little bit like an hourglass these days where there's a lot of low-end jobs

that don't offer that much hope and there are high-end jobs and fewer in between. so i would say that more than anything is what's driving the current decline. many scholars kovac couple hundred years, which is the notion of love and individuals with roman is the purpose of marriage. so most of it, it was an economic arrangement and the best place to raise kids in this helps to secure your economic future and it's a good way to allocate these resources. so sometime after the enlightenment, the notion of love companionship, lifetime soulmate comes in. we have today's adult what is the point of getting married in the most important reason to get

married, love is always at the top of the list. it is a wonderful thing, but it has introduced a kind of fragile element in the heart of this institution. the divorce rates are not quite as high as they were 20 or 30 years ago area that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. and it remains to be seen whether it is an anchor for this institution is economic self-interest have been. one interesting thing going back to the generational component is the latest tech and divorce is actually occurring among older adults. where historically our greatest risk of divorce particularly if you get married very young and you have a higher chance of getting divorced. and today there has been a real spike in older divorces. age 50 and one sort exemplified

in so now he used to be something like only one in 10 divorces among people 50 years old and older and not to one in four. and interestingly it is the baby boomers who are part of the divorce revolution 30 or 40 years ago, also a part of this some people have described it today. and part of what is going on is that couples in their 50s and xt in good health, they say that there's a lot less out there for me to do and the kids are out from underneath and a lot of them have kids that have boomeranged back home. and many say they don't want to

settle, there's an interesting cultural debate over whether this is a good or bad thing. so we are questioning to the public about this. so in terms of these changing family structure is the public is live and let live about divorce. if you asked them what is better, use a divorce is never a happy outcome. but is it better to stay that marriage or get a divorce and many will say, if it's a lousy marriage, get out. so the real concern among the public about the fact that so many fewer adults are marrying these days, it has to do with the extraordinary rise in birth outside of marriage. we go back 40 or 50 years. 5% of all newborns were born to a single mom. today 41% of all newborns are born to a single mom. so the american public is very concerned because they don't

need the sociologist with economists to tell them what they know and if you are born to a single parent your chances can be lower. but that doesn't mean that there aren't row of single moms are singled out. but if you look at the numbers, the correlation between them is pretty hot. >> coming back to this. you are at my lovely gestapo and a book as you always are. and you're talking about outcomes. what are the bad outcomes? welcome i think more than half of all children in poverty today are in single parent households. so that is one of the strongest

correlations. and there are other psychological correlation but i don't want to stretch my credentials on. but children of divorce who are raised by both parents, have a tendency to have a higher level of psychological problems. so one of these says that there are a lot of countries were marriage rates have plummeted. this is not just an american phenomenon. if you look at northern europe, it's even lower than what it is here. this has all but replaced marriage and it is the case where america is unique in the degree between non-marriage, a teenager in this country have less of a chance being raised by biological parents then in any other country in the world. and what that child and young

adult experiences could be up to a difficult outcome. but i would add one more thing that i think is important to keep in mind. because people who have been watching this family breakup or non-formation unfold, you can go back to this report depending on your perspectiperspecti ve in the 60s. they focused on the family. he was very concerned. he said some of us won't work. and this is considered a scandalous number where the out of wedlock birthrate is 25%. and that was a shocking thing that a government official published. so today the rate is 71% and in the hispanic community more than 50%. so there has been a sea of change here. but it is worth pointing out that the negative social outcome that many people said were part

of the dire consequences that would spring forth, some of that hasn't happened. if you look at the indicators for the well-being of children, high school dropout rates, college attainment, crime and other antisocial behaviors, the lines are going in a positive direction. so that speaks to something that i think in number and a part of the book is true. which is the old nuclear family has not completely disappeared, but it has lost its cultural hegemony. there are now many families in. we've talked a lot about mixed-race families, same-sex families, stepfamilies, many types. in many of these families are

fragile and there is a next or ordinary amount of resilience. all americans and are circumstanced continue to place family at the center of their lives and they retain that around whatever family of a hat. does it work better for some people than others are not just. but the fact that this is in trouble doesn't mean that other things haven't have come along and replace them. they have. and we now had advertising showing family forms that would've shocked the american public can, 20, 30 years ago. so it's celebrating the new family and there are images in the chevy commercial where this is american, apple pie. it's same-sex families.

its mix of trent mixed-race families. this is generational. this is a new america and i think young adults are very comfortable with this kind of arrangement over adults, which adults can be a little bit more concerned. >> is marriage good for people? >> yes. i can say that in paraguay. we ask people what of our door opener questions. the first thing that we ask to get people .biz coming how happy are you these days. are you very happy? one happy? not too happy? and then we can run fascinating correlation. what types of people say they're happy and what say that they are not happy. and then you can do a regression to say the business group happy because of this or that.

but the bottom line is that every poll that we have ever taken, these people are happier than unmarried people. so it's just not -- it is probably both as a often the case with this and all the rest. but there's no question, as i said earlier, that marriage is associated with economic income and people who do well financially or people who don't do well. so there's a multiple reinforcement of poorly with us here. >> i know enough to talk about these things with multiple analysis that we look at the correlation between happiness, marriage and happiness and we have just identified the impact

of marriage unhappiness and we can say that married people are 12% more likely than unmarried people to be happy. well, most are things that we look at the control for all those other factors, it washes away. so one of the things his religiosity. people who are very religious and sometimes they are happier than other people. income as well. >> is a great line come over the course of our lives we are accumulating more and more to who we a lesson that. >> yes, this goes back to the nuclear family that relate to all sorts of families. blended and broken and next. and i think it's an open question as to how well that

family serves the people in it over the course of their life. why is that it's in the context of the boomers are now the first generation in our history to head into older age having gone through some of the turbulence and her family lives. high divorce rates and all the rest. so going back to the old paradigm, particularly when you're young, you take care of me when you're old. but then let's say we have a guy who has children that hasn't been involved in the lives of the children. and he is now 65, 70, 75 years old. he doesn't have the strength of that of the generational relationship and he falls down and breaks his hip. he doesn't have a 50 year old daughter was going to worry about him the way that he might if he were a part of her life for the first 50 years of her life. so what we have going into this

is those that don't have the sorts of intergenerational family ties. so far the things that they are beginning to look at a sociologist. it's an interesting development. >> people may not realize that we are a more churched country than we were at the time of the founding. can you sketch out briefly the path of church in america? >> well, listen, religion has been a part of our dna from the beginning. the pilgrims wanted to practice their devout but not conformant brand of christianity. and we have been distinctive in our religion and it was tocqueville that put it best. our most famous early visitor who worked in the early 19th century how devout americans were and they didn't seem to mind if your neighbors had been

of the same. we have always been devout and you see that in our founding documents where everyone has the right to pursue any religion he or she wants. but the state does not have the right to impose this on the public as a whole. cities and states have led to over the course of the 19th century, as a young country we didn't have that many institutions. but we built him up very quickly and a lot of religious institutions throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. and so today we are by far the most religious of any advanced industrialized country. so a lot of people have made the argument about modern than any we've to secularism, we see that in europe where we have these enormous empty cathedrals. they are part of what religion

once played in society. but in america our situation is somewhat different. we remain very core listed. one thing that has gone to happen and there's a chapter in the book about this, meaning what is your religion and the response to the religion is none. that doesn't mean you're atheist or agnostic, but about 20% of the public and 30% -- 33% of millennial day that i have no religion. so only about a quarter sit out. but it simply means that they don't choose to be affiliated with any latest abomination. therefore they don't go to church every week. most of them believe in god. many of them will pray. many of them say that they are spiritual in some way. the rising share of young adults are not comfortable with organized religion.

but it is in the context of a country in terms of religion that is always searching about new ways of doing this with religious life. despite that turned it is not clear that religion is losing its hold on the american public. those who say they go to church every week actually haven't moved on all that much. so you really see that change it has always been attached to the religion and they are more willing to have no religion whereas they may have in previous decades fell pressure to say i am this or that. >> early on in your book you list a bunch of demographic or six about america and say that we are growing older, born equal, more diverse, more digitally linked, less fertile, less religious. some of these traits are

objectively good. some of them are objectively bad. so what degree are all these things went together and wound up with one another? >> into a very large degree. i think the notion of a country that is polarized -- i live in washington and i have been here most of my adult life. and i think most people have a sense that the system has gone very toxic. one of the reasons is people increasingly are moving into communities that it affects their identity and economic identity. and that has been who are at one

pole or the other. it makes it more difficult to find a pragmatic middle. which is a shame. because we do a lot of surveys about politics. and even in this age of what you see on cable tv and all the, they want to solve problems. and they tend not to be the ones who you find in the conversation. so the polarization clearly has influenced our politics have led to a sort of gridlock, which is somewhat important because the public is fed up with both a political party, congress felt is also in the pack. >> having said that, i figure that's the most negative thing and clearly the economic divides are growing and that the negative thing.

i think that these are all things. we are in an ominously heterogeneous society. the thing that has made us tidy work is the fact that there is full fluidity and mobility and that's the greatness of america. if you actually look at the numbers on that, and comes have gotten wider and the ability to start at the bottom and rise to the top empirically is smaller today in this country than it is in our neighboring country with canada and most of the countries of europe. that comes as a little bit of a surprise to people and sort of goes by what we think of ourselves. on the upside it seems to me that immigration has for 240 years, most of our history has been an ace in the hole. immigrants believe in the future. they believe in hard work. they tend to be religious.

they save for the future. and this country was built by immigrants and we love to tell the story of the and they are wonderful stories. but it is the case in every way always produces some backlash. so if we grow and if we go back see what people have said about this, they didn't be very nice to and there is certainly a backlash about this. and it's complicated but this is different. about a quarter of today's immigrants have become leaders. that is a big policy challenge. but they are replenishing the workforce and their keeping us alive and analyze trade some of the challenges that we have with smaller cohost of workers is being solved by immigration and

will continue to be. so the last thing i will raise the fact that it's making art tapestry richer and more multicultural is an enormous strength. but it still people of lots of different colors and ideologies. >> the book is "the next america: boomers, millennials, and the looming generational showdown." paul taylor, thank you for joining us. >> thank you for having me. >> that was "after words." booktv signature programming with authors are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with the material. ..