Thanks to Today’s Global Youth, a Rosy Tomorrow?

NYT Book Review: Thanks to Today’s Global Youth, a Rosy Tomorrow?
By JANET MASLIN
Published: August 10, 2008

THE WAY WE’LL BE
The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream
By John Zogby

....In “The Way We’ll Be,” the man whose organization has been uncommonly accurate in its predictions does not press his luck with political fortune-telling. Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are mentioned only three times each, since this book aspires to predicting more than short-term election trends....

If the bad news is that Americans have lost faith in institutions they once trusted, like the government that so grievously failed Katrina victims, Mr. Zogby sees good news in the resilience of the young. He suggests that tomorrow’s American majority will be less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world. “At long last, cynicism bottoms out,” he predicts in one wildly optimistic moment....

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Zogby International does a great deal of successful extrapolating and reading between lines. And the 2008 presidential election will directly test some of this book’s conclusions. Mr. Zogby thinks he has discovered that the political influence of evangelical and born-again Christians, for instance, has waned. “The results of my polling tell me that the coalition of angry Christians is in sharp retreat,” he writes. “People want more from their president than a perfect attendance record at the local prayer breakfast.” And the people he has surveyed barely care whether their president is a charismatic speaker or has had legislative experience. They want “a competent manager,” a military commander and someone who “can promote the image of the U.S. abroad.”

Is there a Zogby bias? Well, Mr. Zogby cites The Huffington Post as more relevant than traditional news organizations. (Arianna Huffington, that organization’s editor in chief, accordingly supplies a blurb for this book’s back cover.) But in keeping with his book’s general overview, his main idea about the news-gathering business is that it is not moribund but “a textbook case of a paradigm reinventing itself to do more with less.” He believes that kind of reinvention will be necessary all across the American business spectrum.

Mr. Zogby renames the Greatest, Baby Boom, X and Millennial Generations and places great hope in this last group, which he calls First Globals. (The others are called Private, Woodstock and Nike here.) He believes that First Globals see what the other groups do not, and that their lives are public and interconnected in ways that were not possible in pre-Internet times. To hear him tell it, this group will usher in a new era of sanity, substance and citizenship. But his main point about the Globals is more down to earth because “The Way We’ll Be” is as much a sales tool as a sociological study. “If you can’t market successfully to this amazing crew,” he warns businesses about First Global customers, “find another line of work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/books/11masl.html

My daughter and nephew are Millennials, and after seeing how they've turned out, and having met many of their friends who are also politically active, I have great faith in this generation.