A maverick pollster explains why the new American Dream is better than the old one.
The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. By John Zogby. Random House, www.atrandom.com. 2008. 235 pages. $26.
In The Way We’ll Be, pollster John Zogby draws exhaustively on the results of his organization’s long-term polling to reveal what trends are guiding the United States into the future. On the one hand, distrust of political leaders and the mainstream media has become highly pervasive, cutting across all age groups. (A 2004 poll of New Yorkers found that almost half believed the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.) On the other hand, the average 18- to 29-year-old also has a heightened social awareness, a genuine appreciation for diversity and multiculturalism, a more personal spiritual sense of the world, and a broader worldview in general, Zogby reports.
In addition, 25% of this age group “think they’ll end up living for some significant period of time in a country other than America,” and they are more aware of (and more interested in) international politics than previous generations have been. The current twenty-somethings are multilateral as well as multicultural and “want a foreign policy as inclusive and embracive as they are,” writes Zogby. “They expect impediments to trade to be removed so they can shop anywhere, and they want developing countries and their peoples protected from predatory multinational corporations and their fiscal policies that hold the world’s poorest people ransom.”
In other words, politicians and CEOs would be wise not to underestimate the under-30 crowd. Zogby re-dubs the millennial generation the “First Globals,” calling them “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” As he charts their values and beliefs, he repeatedly makes the case that “First Globals are also the most cosmopolitan age group in America, the most international, and the one most concerned about the environment and human rights.”
According to Zogby, First Globals are also proving themselves to be more conscientious consumers, demanding greater honesty and accountability from businesses, political leaders, the media, and themselves. “If there is a single element driving the operating manual of our lives more than any other, it is the demand after so many years of falsity — in products, claims, and promises — that things finally get back to being honest and actual,” he writes.
Despite the relentless fusillade from a multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising industry, First Globals aren’t nearly as materialistic or as “branded” as they were conditioned to become. On the contrary, the conspicuous consumption of previous generations of nouveau-riche is being supplanted by the trappings of a more socially responsible lifestyle, Zogby asserts.
This doesn’t mean that Americans are raising a generation of liberals. What it shows is that the old American Dream has shifted away from materialism and toward what Zogby calls “secular spiritualism,” the search for inner tranquility, a tendency to look for deeper meaning from life. He writes, “Just as Thoreau looked out at the landscape of industrial age America and decried its dehumanizing effects, so these Secular Spiritualists have looked out at the landscape of an America obsessed with consumption and have decided that it isn’t working for them.”
Of course, raw data can be interpreted many different ways. As Zogby points out, “polling is not a crystal ball. Despite our best efforts and the most pristine methodologies, the unpredictability of events sometimes gets in the way.” Polling is most useful as a way to discover emerging trends and changes in cultural values and opinions. Polls don’t determine future outcomes, but they can provide strong indications of what’s to come. Zogby issues a caveat that expresses this nicely: “All I know for sure is what the polls and surveys tell me, and all they can tell me is what people are thinking and intending at the moment the questions are asked.”
That said, when he starts referring to baby boomers as “Woodstockers” and Gen Xers as “Nikes,” it comes across as a way to maintain literary consistency, rather than an inspired method of recategorizing the generations based on polling data. And it’s possible that, by the end, older readers may find themselves experiencing a bit of a backlash toward Zogby’s “favorite child”: a schadenfreude to see the archetypal First Global living in his or her parents’ basement ten years from now, watching grainy political videos on YouTube and muttering about international government conspiracies.
On the other hand, Zogby’s upbeat vision of the future provides a nice counterbalance to doom-and-gloom prophesying. Why argue with the data? Better to take a deep breath and relax. As it turns out, the kids are doing just fine. And the rest of us aren’t doing too bad either. — Aaron M. Cohen
2008 State of the Future. By Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project, www.millennium-project.org. 2008. 104 pages plus a CD-ROM containing 6,300 pages. $49.95.
The Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations has released a State of the Future report every year since 1996. This latest edition draws upon all 12 predecessors and incorporates findings from 229 new contributing futurists, business planners, and scientists.
The report identifies 15 Global Challenges that experts conclude will demand worldwide cooperation to resolve; summarizes, in a State of the Future Index, data collected over the last 20 years to project five areas in which the human species will gain ground and five in which it will lose ground; and proposes ways for new systems of communication and information-sharing to coordinate global action necessary to address the 15 Global Challenges.
The report’s authors bring together much of the contributors’ research findings through a survey method called Real-Time Delphi Technique, in which participants answer questionnaires in one year and are allowed to revise their answers at any time thereafter. The 15 Global Challenges are the results tallied from a Delphi survey ongoing since 1996; the State of the Future Index used a Real-Time Delphi Technique survey dating back to 2006.
The report gives reason to look forward to substantially reduced world poverty, rising literacy, and vast increases in worldwide Internet availability and use. Yet it also finds much to fear: As much as half the world might witness violence and upheaval due to rising energy and food costs, unstable governments, climate change, water shortages, desertification, and increasing migrations of refugees.
The survey participants find hope for solving these problems, however, in ever-evolving communications technologies and in government “foresight units.” Communications technologies such as the Internet enable people across the globe to share ideas, cooperate on initiatives, and allocate resources more easily than ever before. Foresight units keep public officials aware of worldwide developments that need to be considered when formulating policies. The report spotlights the present foresight units of 10 individual governments, and urges other governments to form foresight units as well. The authors hope that those units might connect to each other and to partners in the nonprofit and business sectors to form a worldwide grid of information sharing, idea development, and strategy implementation.
“This does not mean world government; it means world governance — civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules,” the report states.
Additional international coordination systems might target the specific challenges of sustainable energy policies: a Global Energy Network to link energy experts and a Global Energy Information System to serve as a knowledge base for information about energy. Energy and environmental matters in general merit special consideration, since ecological problems factor into many armed conflicts.
“A new global system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of energy options for decision making is urgently needed,” the report states.
The 2008 State of the Future report is an ambitious meeting of research and vision, presenting a grand-scale sweep of today’s world and its difficulties. It puts forth blueprints for an ambitious mobilization of world-conscious citizens and governments across the globe. That mobilization is a powerful break from the squabbles that feed the world-news sections of today’s newspapers. It becomes clear that the contributing researchers hope for a new and better world. Anyone who shares their hope will find the 2008 State of the Future report a welcome resource. — Rick Docksai