More than 30 years ago, the U.S. marketplace first woke up to the "young demographic." The obstreperous children of the baby boom, who seemed then to have discovered the secret of eternal youth, are now well into their own troubled and compromised midlife. Yet advertisers and the media -- as well as politicians and policymakers -- continue to be obsessed with youth and are seemingly oblivious to the needs and views of older Americans. As one aging advertising copywriter lamented in a New York Times Magazine special issue on this age boom, "to advertisers, youth is excitement and pizazz. ... It all goes back to one of those unwritten rules of marketing: Don't target consumers who are 50 and over because they're beyond reach."

In The Conquest of Cool, his 1997 book on "business culture, counter culture, and the rise of hip consumerism," Thomas Frank argues that the preoccupation with youth that emerged in the 1960s will be with us forever. "Youth must always win," he writes. "The new naturally replaces the old. ... We will have new generations of youth rebellion as certainly as we will have new generations of mufflers or toothpaste or footwear." If Frank is right, then the U.S. corporate sector and its media are at war with the United States Census Bureau. So are politicians who fail to take heed of the elderly. All are living in ignorance of the central demographic fact of the 21st century: The young are a vanishing breed. The future lies with the old.

Though the young may remain a market, they are fated to dwindle steadily in numbers and purchasing power. The United States began growing collectively older as early as 1800. In Thomas Jefferson's time, half the white population was below 16 years old, an age-to-youth ratio that the country was never to see again. Throughout the 19th century, despite the demographic ups and downs of waves of immigration and killer epidemics, life expectancy grew longer and the society grew steadily older. By the 1930s, national conferences were being held to explore solutions to the problems posed by a rapidly growing senior population. Today, Americans over 50 make up the fastest-growing segment of society.

The great exception to the long-term aging of U.S. society was the reproductive outburst that took place between 1946 and 1964. Through those years, U.S. births ballooned to an average rate of 3.7 children per family. Less than a decade later, as if in a fit of exhaustion, total fertility among women in the United States dropped off, reaching a record low average of 1.7 births per family by 1976 -- well below the rate needed to replace the population. Since then, as in most industrialized societies, the birth rate has continued its downward slide. That our overall rate of population growth has hovered around the replacement number is increasingly a consequence of immigration.

Everywhere in industrialized societies, couples are marrying later (if they marry at all), waiting longer to have babies, and then having fewer of them. As even population-bomb alarmists now admit, declining procreation is inextricably connected with what the modern world calls progress. Women, especially, experience childlessness or late parenthood as liberating; it allows them to spend more of their lives exploring careers, traveling, learning. This country's baby boomers themselves established this pattern of reproduction. In the mid-1970s, when the women's liberation movement was at its peak, the number of childless women in their 20s doubled; in the next decade, births tripled for women between the ages of 30 and 35. Most of these older mothers worked and had fewer babies, often only one.

For a brief profile of the aging "baby-boomer" generation,
please click here.

But it is not just in sheer numbers that older Americans increasingly overshadow the young. Their share of the national wealth vastly exceeds that of their children and grandchildren -- a fact that might be of considerable interest to those marketers who so eagerly court a youthful audience. The quarter of the U.S. population that will be over 50 years old at the turn of the 21st century has an annual personal income approaching a trillion [one million million] dollars. These older Americans control fully half of the country's disposable income, 75 percent of its financial assets (worth more than $8 trillion) and 80 percent of its savings and loan accounts.

With a long life expectancy ahead of it, the boomer generation will get richer as it gets older. Boomers will inherit some $10.7 trillion from their parents. The Social Security Administration estimates that, thanks to personal savings, Medicare, home ownership and tax breaks, Americans over 65 years of age now have the largest amount of discretionary income in the nation -- more than twice as much as those between 25 and 34. Among postmenopausal women alone, there exists what syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman calls "a marketeer's dream" -- 50 million alert, book-buying, culture-consuming females, many of them the first beneficiaries of hormone replacement therapy that will keep them alive and active, and perhaps even earning, deep into their senior years.

"There will always be a youth market," observes Cheryl Russell, a contributing editor at American Demographics, "but it won't always be powerful relative to other markets. In the future, American business has got to learn to love the middle-aged."

A demographic change this dramatic cannot help but be linked to larger political changes in the offing. As U.S. society's financial and political center of gravity shifts steadily toward age, the values that take hold among older Americans become ever more consequential. Seniors are not only the primary property-owners in the United States; they are also the country's most conscientious voters. Winning their allegiance will be the great electoral prize of the coming century.

Studies of voting behavior show that senior voters have no predictable political orientation on anything -- except obvious threats to entitlements. As conservative as they may be on many issues, elders are the anchor of the welfare state, and that anchor is getting heavier with each passing year. This inexorable trend accounts for the peculiar urgency of the campaigns to slash or privatize entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. For example, the Paul Tsongas Project, a branch of the fiscally conservative Concord Coalition, has been holding public forums on "generational responsibility" and announcing in its literature that "before the baby boom becomes the senior boom, our political leaders have a window of opportunity" to reform entitlements policy. The project believes that entitlements will "soon consume all federal revenues."

That sounds alarming, but how "soon" is this going to happen? If we were to do nothing to restructure Social Security between now and 2032, the system would still be able to pay 75 percent of what it owes. Even taken at the extreme, there isn't a very convincing emergency. But of course U.S. society will not just sit and do "nothing" about Social Security. As the Social Security Administration has made clear, a series of modest, gradual adjustments in funding and coverage -- none of which require privatization -- will keep the program solvent for the next century.

Other foes of entitlements have pressed their critique even more formidably. Peter G. Peterson, founding president of the Concord Coalition, warns that Medicare will soon have to invoke the "R" word: rationing. He may believe, as he has stated, that he is defending the interests of "our children" -- but it will be instructive to see how many of those children will prove willing to pinch pennies when a for-profit managed-care administrator informs them that it will cost the HMO too much to keep their ailing parents alive.

Once, it was the task of trade unions to see that the wealth of the nation was spread equitably. In the years ahead, we may have to look to grandparent power as the only force strong and compassionate enough to check corporate America and the expansion of globalization. If such an insurgency seems like a lot to hope for from elders, we should bear in mind that the boomers are a generation that has always expected a lot of itself. Future seniors cannot be judged by current seniors; when baby boomers join the senior category, we can expect rather different political behavior.

For a sketch of the creative potential of the next
older generation, please click here.

The next older generation in the United States will be the best educated, most widely traveled, most professionally trained, most politically astute and most culturally creative generation this country has ever produced. And they have a remarkable heritage. They have staked out a place in the history books as rebels who eventually rallied to many noble causes: civil rights, nuclear disarmament, sexual freedom, consumer advocacy, environmental sanity and women's, gay and ethnic liberation. Not since the days of such independent political figures as Robert LaFollette and President Theodore Roosevelt, in the early decades of this century, has any generation confronted the power structure by raising challenging questions about the ethical use of wealth and power.

Youth is one time to assume such high moral airs; old age is another. It is true that the dissenting younger generation of the 1960s grew into a responsible adulthood that took its toll on their idealism. But in time, adults grow still older and at last retire into a condition not unlike the freedom of a campus.

One person who recognized that fact early on, back in the 1960s, is Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, an intergenerational advocacy and educational organization working for social and economic justice. It addresses such issues as national health care, jobs, social security, housing, sustainable environment, education and peace. "The old," she observed, "having the benefit of life experience, the time to get things done, and the least to lose by sticking their necks out, were in a perfect position to serve as advocates for the larger public good."

It was a mistake to write off college students of the 1960s as conventional members of the middle class. It might be just as foolish to assume that the next senior generation will simply fade into political oblivion the same way their elders did when they were few in number and the word "old" was invariably linked to the word "poor." "Retirement," Kuhn has further observed, "is like being rich. Nobody can fire you."

If they search through their ethical repertoire, aging boomers will easily find a wealth of counterculture alternatives to draw upon in shaping the longevity revolution. They grew up with the sort of utopian longings that social critics like Paul Goodman took to be the beginning of significant political change. The first time around, those who dreamed up alternatives to the status quo may have been immature; they needed the benefit of ripening. And that is what they have gained in passing from the 1960s to the 1990s. They are now the older generation, no longer to be dismissed as spoiled children. Retirement gives them the time -- and entitlements allow them the opportunity -- to return to the moral passion that once marked them as an amazing generation.

These days the cartoon stereotype of the older American is that of a cadaverous parasite shuffling across the putting green. That image is far from accurate for our existing elders, who are expanding the economy's volunteer sector, returning to school in growing numbers, becoming ever more politically engaged, and demonstrating a keen interest in keeping up with modernity by becoming computer literate. As every retirement advisor knows, in their later years people grow serious about the meaning of life and seek to devote themselves to matters of lasting significance. The next generation of seniors may discover such meaning in the work they left unfinished so many years ago.

The poet William Wordsworth, coming of age in the time of the French Revolution, wrote of the youth who lived through that turbulent era: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/And to be young was very heaven!" It would be remarkable, indeed, if the true destiny of radical dissent in our time lies not in the dawn of this peculiar generation, but in its twilight years still waiting to be realized.

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Theodore Roszak is professor of history at California State University, Hayward. He is the author of America the Wise: The Longevity Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), and The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (University of California Press, 1995).

This article previously appeared in the October/November 1998 issue of Civilization. It is reprinted by permission.