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Generational Loss

October 24, 2024 by Leave a Comment

According to the charts and analysis in Jean W. Twenge’s new book, Generations, some disturbing patterns are emerging. In this case, we seems to be the children and teenagers, our offspring, the people who will manage peace and prosperity as they engage in human progress. Perhaps “will” is an unreasonable term because, in many ways, that progress has already begun.

There has been a precipitous drop in 12th graders who attend religious services once a week or more. For many years, until around 2015, the percentage hovered around 60 percent. Today, it’s about 30 percent. Anyway, that’s the trend for Black Americans. It’s worse for White Americans (gee, I hate these terms, but that’s another story). The drop among White Americans has been more-or-less steady since 1982 or so, with a brief bump around 2000, but just for a while. Pretty much, there’s half as much interest as there was before. Certainly, religion is not a perfect solution to sense of self and community engagement, but it’s an indicator, and it’s not heading in a healthy direction. Among people 18-25 in the U.S., belief in God has dropped from about 85 percent in the early 1970s down to about 55 percent today. No problem if religion has been replaced by an equally distinguished philosophical basis for life. However, if we just drop the idea altogether, then we don’t think much about ethnics, or beyond ourselves, outside of the often-self-serving political arena. One hopes there is more to life than that.

Next institution: government. Back in 2000 or so, about 25 percent of U.S. adults were dissatisfied with government. Today, about 70 percent are dissatisfied. Big change, and that’s across the whole adult population, not just the younger ones.

Twelfth-grade boys have become far more politically conservative — in the late 1970s, conservative applied to about 40 percent of boys, and now, it’s up to over 60 percent. At the same time, girls start in the early 170s at about 35 percent, and they’re now DOWN to about 30 percent. So, we’ve got a lot more conservative males and a lot fewer conservative females growing up.

Comparing U.S. children, ages 2-5, from 2010 to 2019, less than 10 percent were physically active less than four days a week in 2010, but the number is now 18 percent — a big change in just a decade. The situation is worse for kids 6-11 — in 2012, it was 14 percent and now it’s 28 percent.

Some good news — in 1959, about 28 percent of children lived in poverty, and that number has been cut in half. Unfortunately, adults have not fared as well — 18 percent in 1959 compared with 10 percent today (so, a cut of 1/3).

There are many more lonely 15 year olds today than there were in 2000 or so — about 10 percent then, and about 35 percent now. Many more 15-25 year olds are unhappy now (about 20 percent) than there were in about 2005 (less than 5 percent).

Far fewer people who are 20-24 years old are getting married in the U.S. — nearly 70 percent of females were married around 1970, down to about 15 percent today. Good reasons why, certainly. As for men, it’s 45 percent down to 8 percent.

It may not be surprising to learn that the percentage of high school students identifying as lesbian gay or bisexual has been steadily increasing. In 9th, 10th, 11th and 12 grades, the 2015 figures looked like about 8 or 9 percent, then, and about 14 or 15 percent now. Soon, those numbers will approach 1 in 5 high school students. This seems to be true in both red and blue states.

These are among the biggest changes I found in Twenge’s new book. What do they mean? More independent decision-making among young people. Less reliance upon institutions. Less support for decisions that diverge from older established ways. Good reasons for fear that the world is, indeed, changing — and veering away from tradition. The book looks at each generation alive today, and considers the changes each group has experienced.

Trying to frame clear, concise, straightforward opinions based on the information in this book is very hard to do because, in the end, everyone is so different from one another. It’s become difficult to make blanket statements about any generation — and this may have always been true. Still, reviewing the many graphs and explanations in this book is provocative, good stuff for deeper thought, challenging assumptions, and changing one’s mind about long-held beliefs. It’s a good read, and because so much of the real estate is filled with graphs (lots and lots of them), it’s a book that reads fairly quickly, but this does not diminish the book’s value.

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Food: The Meta-layer

March 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Past few months, everybody’s talking about the meta-layer. We don’t just watch TV. We add a meta-layer, tweeting about the Academy Awards, commenting on comments–ideas piled on ideas. We’re learning to comment on everything, with or without the requisite knowledge of the facts involved, rarely with the research needed to form a coherent opinion.

Not so with Mr. Gopnik, whose past stories about his young family’s life in Paris (Paris to the Moon) and their return to Manhattan (Through the Children’s Gate) are among my most-recommended books, and whose 2011 book, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food has provided several months of nourishing food for thought, or thoughts about food, probably some of each.

Where did restaurants come from? Who came up with the idea of not just eating outside the home, but dining there? (Long answer, begins around the French revolution). Quite rightly, he compares the restaurant customer to an aristocrat, accustomed to being served (and served beautifully). Gopnik delights in grazing through the thoughts of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod–two early, influential writers about food and dining–but I like the bit that he found in Robert Frost best:

“Home is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. A restaurant is a place where, when you go there, they not only have to take you in but act as though they were glad to see you. In cities of strangers, this pretense can be very dear.”

This is a book in which New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik thinks about food, and thinks about how others think, and have thought, about food. He goes deep, with some chapters so mired in philosophy or history that they eventually become indigestible. Fortunately, these are exceptions. And when the going becomes thick, he pauses for to write an email to Elizabeth Pennell, who wrote with intelligence and wisdom about food about a century ago; these chatty emails cover the true benefits of cinnamon, the best ways to cook lamb, the extraordinary use of hot air in the hard-to-find and hard-to-cook pommel soufflés, his dog Butterscotch’s love for steak, and other lighthearted stuff.

Adam Gopnik is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

This is not a book to read over a single meal. It is, instead, book to be savored, bit by bit, over several months. There is simply too much information, too many glimpses and meta ideas, too much richness and provocation and serious research, to be enjoyed quickly. It is slow food for the brain–imagine that, in an era of emails and tweets–much of it about topics I’ve never really thought much about.

For example, Gopnik compares “cook it at home” recipe books that restaurants sell with the home game version of, say, Hollywood Squares. Certainly, there is a resemblance, but the resources and the spicing are entirely different, and so is the experience. He tells a long and funny/odd story about his search for a live chicken that can be purchased, cooked, and eaten within the bounds of New York City, and another about the cleverness of farming tilapia to feed large urban populations, then adds the zesty meta-layer, invoking Adam Smith and the total cost associated with what he believes to be a current fad for localism. And so:

“If Kenyan greens take less total energy than Plattsburgh tomatoes, then we should revel in them no matter how far they have to travel.”

And so it goes, through questions about whether we really can taste the differences between wines (or whether the situation and the artifice overpower the actual human capacity for taste), the imperfection of memory as it applies to the fancy French restaurants of 20th century Manhattan, why sugar was used mostly to flavor tea in England but became the impetus for the pasty industry in France, the various ethical arguments for and against the slaughter of animals for human consumption, and so much more.

As with his own food choices–today, spicy beans and rice, tomorrow, a complicated and challenging attempt at a classic French dish from a century ago–some sections are rich with friendly storytelling and some are thick with pretense, serious thinking, and historical reconsiderations. Unlike Twitter, you need not absorb every idea in an instant. There is time enough to consider the meta-layer, to appreciate the fine writing that has long been Gopnik’s strong suit, time enough to think about what Gopnik has said about what others have said and done, and perchance, to learn something about their ideas by reading Brillat-Savarin in the original (on my list, but not for this year).

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