You would think so, listening to the pessimism now fashionable among U.S. demographers. To many of them, 21st-century America looks crowded, mean-spirited and glum–a balkanized nation increasingly split between haves and have-nots, old and young, and immigrants and the native-born. By 2050 the population of the United States could rise to more than 500 million persons, more than double the 1990 census and enough growth to scare anyone who cares about the environment. The percentages of Latinos, African-Americans and Asians will jump, and whites could become a minority as early as the 2050s. The social fabric will be strained, in this view, by ethnic tensions and by the cost of supporting 33 million elderly on Social Security and Medicare. Decaying cities will be surrounded by enormous suburbs segregated by race and class. The gap between rich and poor will be a chasm. There is plenty of data to support this dystopian vision–but that does not mean it will come true. Take the familiar forecast that whites will become a minority by such-and-such a year. It will probably happen someday, but no one can be sure when. Meanwhile, there are signs that Americans are adapting to ethnic diversity–and there are forces at work that will tend to obscure it. The intermarriage rate between blacks and whites, while still small, is rising, and the number of Latinos marrying across ethnic lines is increasing as well. Federal officials are already field-testing a census questionnaire that will allow millions of hyphenated Americans to check some version of the “other” box when asked to specify their race. So by 2050 we may indeed be trending toward the cafE au lait society–and the race-counters will have an increasingly hard time keeping score.
Regional concentrations will become even more pronounced. Census projections show that 70 percent of population growth will take place in the South and West, a continuation of a trend evident since the 1970s (chart). Forecasts for 2025 suggest slow decline for the Northeast and only moderate growth for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. But the South, led by Texas and Florida, will jump from 91 million to 121 million people–and California is in a class by itself. If the state’s forecasts are on target, California will grow from 30 million in 1990 to 63 million in 2040–dwarfing the combined populations of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (about 40 million). The population of Los Angeles County, now 9.5 million, will rise to 16 million. Whites will become a minority as early as 2002, and by 2040 its Latino population will reach 31 million–half the total. The political implications are obvious. The California of 2040 would command as many as 77 seats in Congress and 79 electoral votes. “We’ve seen Pete Wilson and Pat Buchanan playing successfully to white fears about immigration,” says demographer William Frey of the University of Michigan. “We’re not going to see [politicians] get away with that in another 10 years.”
Frey is the leading proponent of the theory that the United States is “balkanizing” as it grows. His research shows that native-born whites are leaving coastal states and streaming inland as the immigrant population rises. Between 1990 and 1995, for example, California gained 1.3 million immigrants while losing 1.5 million natives to states like Arizona, Nevada and Idaho. (A similar trend is underway in New York state.) Extrapolating to the 21st century, Frey sees second- and third-generation immigrants concentrated on the coasts while the native-born whites cluster in the heartland.
The graying of America is a major driver here. A good part of the population shifts Frey tracks is triggered by retirement–and the big event is yet to come. By 2030, the number of Americans over 65 will nearly double, from 39 million to 69 million, and the elderly will constitute 20 percent of the population. By 2050, more than 18 million Americans will be over 85, and much of that group will cluster in just 10 states–the Southeast, including Florida, plus California, Arizona, Washington, Colorado and Texas. One unresolved question, according to Peter Morrison of the RAND Corp., is whether medical advances will extend life even farther–but the biggest issue, he says, is how we should allocate resources between old and young.
This is a polite way of predicting what some Cassandras call “generational warfare.” The future of Social Security and Medicare is the obvious case in point–but that battle, which has already begun, is only the entering wedge of what many demographers see as a profound challenge to our national well-being. The trend that scares even optimists is the growing income disparity in the United States. Simply put, the rich are getting richer while middle-income families are staying put–and the poor are significantly worse off. In 1968, the top fifth of the population earned about six times more income than the bottom fifth. By 1994, that ratio was nearly 10 to 1. The growing isolation of the poor in inner cities further compounds the problem–and leads demographer Douglas S. Massey of the University of Pennsylvania to predict something close to a “Blade Runner” scenario. “It’s only been in the past five years that we’ve realized something really big has happened,” Massey says. “I think there is tremendous potential for racial and ethnic strife and political instability in the United States.”
Massey and others see the root causes of this income disparity in structural economic change–global competition and the cyber-revolution. Americans with the education to compete in the high-tech workplace will do very well in the future, they say, while others will be increasingly left out. The bright side is that the number of Americans with college degrees is rising and may reach 40 percent of the population by 2050. The dark side is that no one knows what to do about the left-outs. Economist William Dickens of the Brookings Institution sees the economic future in brighter terms than Massey. He thinks corporate downsizing has mostly run its course and that the computer revolution will create millions of worthwhile jobs. But even Dickens thinks the income disparity spells trouble. “We’re going back to where we were before World War II,” Dickens says. “At this point I don’t think it’s anything more than discomfort. But if I’m wrong [about the economy] and the trends don’t reverse themselves quickly, we’re going to have really significant social problems” in about 10 years.
The continuing erosion of the family is another sign of trouble. Although the U.S. divorce rate appears to have leveled off since 1980, it is still very high: nearly half of all American children will experience the breakup of their parents’ marriage before the age of 18. Single parenting, almost always by the mother, is on the rise among both blacks and whites: about a third of all American children now live in single-parent homes. Kids in single-parent households are twice as likely to drop out of school or get pregnant during their teenage years, and the risk is just as high for kids from the “blended families” that result from remarriage after divorce. And because two-wage-earner households are now the national norm, intact families are under enormous stress as well. Kids in less affluent homes, where day care and pricey after-school activities are out of reach, suffer from the lack of quality time. “We say it’s up to the parents to raise their children well, but we know they don’t have the time or the resources to do it,” says Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania. “There’s a lot of blank time in these kids’ lives. We have to be concerned about what children are going to look like as a result of family life in the 21st century.”
Few would dispute the idea that the nation has its share of social problems–or that left untended, these problems could worsen in the new millennium. But Americans have faced hardship in the past: the Great Depression was such a time, and so, for black Americans, was segregation. The genius of America is its ability to face its difficulties and make creative social adjustments. All it takes is faith in the future–a form of confidence that is the most American trait of all.
Predicting the shape of the future is always a hazardous business. But certainly the United States is in for a growth spurt. According to the census Bureau, in 2050 America will be 50 percent more populous than it was in 1995. The largest growth will be in the nation’s Hispanic and elderly populations, each of which will represent almost 20 percent of the country’s makeup. What these changes will mean is anybody’s guess. A look at who we are and who we will be:
MAP: Where Americans Lived, 1995
MAP: Where They Will Live, 2025
GRAPH: The Shape of the Age Gap
GRAPHS: An Aging Population That Will Need More Care
By 2025, the number of Hispanics will increase dramatically –and their political power is sure to grow proportionately.
HISPANIC POPULATION BY NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF EACH STATE, TOP FIVE STATES 1995 2025 New Mexico 657,000 41% 1,241,000 48% California 9,206,000 29 21,232,000 43 Texas 5,173,000 28 10,230,000 38 Nevada 192,000 13 583,000 25 Florida 1,955,000 14 4,944,000 24
We don’t know what the future will be like, but experts say we will be around longer to experience it. On average, Hispanics will live the longest.
LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH 1995 2050 Whites 77 84 Hispanics 79 87 African-Americans 69 74 Asians 82 86 Native Americans 76 82
Call it diversity or balkinization–the fact is, 30 years from now the nation will be a lot less white and a lot more evrything else. While the population of all races will grow, some will grow faster than others.
1995 2050 White 74% 53% Asian 3 8 Native Am. 1 1 Hispanic 10 24 African-Am. 12 14
May 6, 2036: A new study on who does the chores in American households shows that men have finally caught up with women–10 years after women began bringing home half of all family income. The study, by researchers at the Betty Friedan Center in New York, shows that over the past decade, a majority of U.S. husbands and male “homemates” have begun to take equal shares of essential chores like shopping, cleaning, laundry and tending to the needs of children. Sociologists and women’s activists have argued for years that men’s reluctance to accept child-care responsibilities was one of the last real barriers to equal career opportunities for women. Although women attained parable worth in 2016 and earned half of all U.S. family income by 2026, the housework gap persisted until late last year, the study said. “Changing attitudes just takes time,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. Tiffany Limbaugh. “But we think there have been some frank discussions in many of the households we studied.” The study was based on a national sample of more than 2,000 households, including 1,320 with one or more children. For accuracy’s sake, only women’s responses were tabulated. “Historically, the guys have tended to exaggerate a bit,” Limbaugh said.
