{"id":15595,"date":"2015-08-27T11:27:42","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T15:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15595"},"modified":"2015-08-27T11:27:42","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T15:27:42","slug":"although-millennials-are-most-numerous-youth-share-is-shrinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15595","title":{"rendered":"although Millennials are most numerous, youth share is shrinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2015\/01\/16\/this-year-millennials-will-overtake-baby-boomers\/\">reports<\/a>, &#8220;This year, the &#8216;Millennial&#8217; generation is projected to surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation\u2019s largest living generation, according to the population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau last month.&#8221; His article is illustrated with this graph:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/files\/2015\/01\/FT_15.01.15_line.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"310\" height=\"428\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That analysis tells one important story. It suggests that the youngest generation will\u00a0have growing\u00a0political, economic, and cultural clout, which is true in some respects.<\/p>\n<p>But there is also another valid story: even as the Millennials outnumber each of the older generations taken separately, younger people are declining\u00a0as a percentage of the whole population. That analysis suggests that their political clout (dependent on their share of voters and activists)\u00a0will likely shrink.<\/p>\n<p>How can this be?\u00a0On one hand, the youngest generation is larger than its predecessors because of population growth, while the older generations are shrinking because of mortality. (The downward slope of the Boomers in the Pew chart above is a <em>momento mori<\/em>.) Yet, on the other hand, each of the older age categories is larger today than the same\u00a0category was in\u00a0the past. The median age, after all, is rising. Since there are many age categories, not just two, it&#8217;s possible for the youngest generation to grow relative to every\u00a0other generation while also shrinking relative to the whole. And that is what has happened\u00a0over the past 50 years, as my graph shows:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15596\" src=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/age-distribution2.png\" alt=\"age distribution\" width=\"478\" height=\"315\" srcset=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/age-distribution2.png 478w, https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/age-distribution2-300x198.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 478px) 100vw, 478px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If we are champions of youth civic engagement, I think we can take some advantage of the large numbers of Millennials, but we must\u00a0also\u00a0address the fact that youth represent\u00a0a smaller proportion of the whole population than\u00a0ever before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center reports, &#8220;This year, the &#8216;Millennial&#8217; generation is projected to surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation\u2019s largest living generation, according to the population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau last month.&#8221; His article is illustrated with this graph: That analysis tells one important story. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15595"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15600,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15595\/revisions\/15600"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}