Upending the conventional theory that generational differences are caused by major events, Dr. Jean Twenge analyzes data on 39 million people from robust national surveys--some going back nearly a century--to show that changes in technology are the underlying driver of each generation's unique makeup. In this revelatory work, Twenge outlines key shifts in attitudes and lifestyle choices that define each generation regarding gender, income, politics, race, sexuality, marriage, mental health, and much more.

Surprising, engaging, and informative, Generations gets you thinking about how appreciating generational differences can, ironically, bring us together (Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author). It will forever change the way you view your parents, peers, coworkers, and children, no matter which generation you call your own.

Upending the conventional theory that generational differences are caused by major events, Dr. Jean Twenge analyzes data on 39 million people from robust national surveys--some going back nearly a century--to show that changes in technology are the underlying driver of each generation's unique makeup. In this revelatory work, Twenge outlines key shifts in attitudes and lifestyle choices that define each generation regarding gender, income, politics, race, sexuality, marriage, mental health, and much more.

Surprising, engaging, and informative, Generations gets you thinking about how appreciating generational differences can, ironically, bring us together (Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author). It will forever change the way you view your parents, peers, coworkers, and children, no matter which generation you call your own.

Born after 1995, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before high school, and cannot remember a time before the Internet. They are iGen. Now, here is crucial reading to understand how these children, teens, and young adults are vastly different from their millennial predecessors, and from any other generation.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today's rising generation of teens and young adults.

Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person--perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality.

As this new group of young people grows into adulthood, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation--and the world.

*As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR*

Race is once again a contentious topic in America, as shown by the divisive rise of Donald Trump and the activism of groups like Black Lives Matter. Yet, Diversity Explosion argues that the current period of profound racial change will lead to a less divided nation than today's older whites or younger minorities fear. Prominent demographer William Frey sees America's emerging diversity boom as good news for a country that would otherwise become isolated from the rest of world while facing declining growth and rapid aging for years to come.

In this updated and revised edition of his award-winning book, Frey draws lessons from the 2016 presidential election and fresh statistics to paint a clear picture of where America's racial demography is headed--and what it means for the nation's future. His new analysis of election data and the changing electorate shows how Trump's win highlights a major fissure in today's America: a cultural generation gap where many baby boomers and seniors are fearful about the nation's diversifying population, while at the same time younger adults--especially millennials--welcome it. Frey explains how, despite this gap, broad demographic forces will alter the nation's social and political landscape in the not-too-distant future, as older Americans and those living in red states come to absorb and embrace the contributions of multihued generations that are rapidly growing and dispersing. Clearly, the phrase demography is destiny is salient in ways that both political parties need to recognize.

Drawing from the U.S. Census, recent national surveys, and related sources, Frey tells how the rapidly growing new minorities--Hispanics, Asians, and multiracial Americans--along with African Americans and other groups, are transforming and reinvigorating communities from cities to suburbs and from the coasts to the heartland. He discusses their impact on generational change, neighborhood segregation, and interracial marriage, as well as presidential politics.

Diversity Explosion is an accessible, richly illustrated overview of how unprecedented racial change is remaking the United States once again. It is an essential guide for political strategists, marketers, investors, educators, policymakers, and anyone who wants to understand the magnitude, potential, and promise of the new national melting pot in the 21st century.

[A] razor sharp book of cultural criticism . . . With blistering prose and all-too vivid reporting, Petersen lays bare the burnout and despair of millennials, while also charting a path to a world where members of her generation can feel as if the boot has been removed from their necks.--Esquire

An analytically precise, deeply empathic book about the psychic toll modern capitalism has taken on those shaped by it. Can't Even is essential to understanding our age, and ourselves.--Ezra Klein, Vox co-founder and New York Times best-selling author of Why We're Polarized

An incendiary examination of burnout in millennials--the cultural shifts that got us here, the pressures that sustain it, and the need for drastic change

Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you're too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture.

While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can't Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to perform our lives online. The genesis for the book is Petersen's viral BuzzFeed article on the topic, which has amassed over seven million reads since its publication in January 2019.

Can't Even goes beyond the original article, as Petersen examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout (think: unchecked capitalism and changing labor laws) and examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses--including how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize--describing its resonance in alarming familiarity. Utilizing a combination of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, Can't Even offers a galvanizing, intimate, and ultimately redemptive look at the lives of this much-maligned generation, and will be required reading for both millennials and the parents and employers trying to understand them.

For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline--and in many countries, that decline has already begun.

In Empty Planet, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women.

But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States and Canada are well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism leads us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever.

Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Praise for Empty Planet

An ambitious reimagining of our demographic future.--The New York Times Book Review

The authors combine a mastery of social-science research with enough journalistic flair to convince fair-minded readers of a simple fact: Fertility is falling faster than most experts can readily explain, driven by persistent forces.--The Wall Street Journal

The beauty of this book is that it links hard-to-grasp global trends to the easy to-understand individual choices being made all over the world today . . . a gripping narrative of a world on the cusp of profound change.--The New Statesman

John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker have written a sparkling and enlightening guide to the contemporary world of fertility as small family sizes and plunging rates of child-bearing go global.-The Globe and Mail

For several decades, wealthy states, international development agencies and multinational corporations have encouraged labour migration from the Global South to the Global North. As well as providing essential workers to support the transformation of advanced economies, the remittances that migrants send home have been touted as the most promising means of national development for poor and undeveloped countries.

As Immanuel Ness argues in this sharp corrective to conventional wisdom, temporary labour migration represents the most recent form of economic imperialism and global domination. A closer look at the economic and social evidence demonstrates that remittances deepen economic exploitation, unravel societal stability and significantly expand economic inequality between poor and rich societies. The book exposes the damaging political, economic and social effects of migration on origin countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and how border and security mechanisms control and marginalize low-wage migrant workers, especially women and youth. Ness asserts that remittances do not bring growth to poor countries but extend national dependence on the export of migrant workers, leading to warped and unequal development on the global periphery.

This expert take will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of migration and development across the social sciences.

We are the most educated and hardworking generation in American history. We poured historic and insane amounts of time and money into preparing ourselves for the 21st-century labor market. We have been taught to consider working for free (homework, internships) a privilege for our own benefit. We are poorer, more medicated, and more precariously employed than our parents, grandparents, even our great grandparents, with less of a social safety net to boot.

Kids These Days is about why. In brilliant, crackling prose, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets mercilessly real about our maligned birth cohort. Examining trends like runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more, Harris gives us a portrait of what it means to be young in America today that will wake you up and piss you off.

Millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments, Harris argues, and in Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up.

Over the last century, the world's population quadrupled and fears of overpopulation flared, with baby booms blamed for genocide and terrorism, and overpopulation singled out as the primary factor driving global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the population explosion is past its peak--by mid-century, the world's population will be declining for the first time in over seven hundred years. In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce reveals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift and describes the environmental, social, and economic effects of our surprising demographic future.

Thomas Malthus was a mild-mannered economist who set the world afire in 1798 with this essay on the 'principle of population.' Prompted to put his thoughts down on paper in response to a work by William Godwin (Avarice and Profusion) and other writers, such as Marquis de Condorcet and Adam Smith, the book was originally published anonymously... and for good reason. Malthus understood that the implications of his 'principle' did not align well with Christian charity.

Charles Darwin would eventually seize upon the 'population principle, ' where strife surrounds humanity's quest for scarce natural resources, as the actual mechanism by which life emerged in the first place, through natural selection. Now imbued with the certainty of science, Malthus' principle combined with Darwin's insight, was begging for application to human society. The application most commonly is called 'eugenics.' However, other applications exist, too, such as 'population control.'

This is the original 1798 edition. In later editions, Malthus would spend a great deal of time clarifying his position and defending himself against critics. It was one of these later editions that Darwin was influenced by. Still, it is always interesting to hear the argument as it was first proposed.

This edition also includes the essay by Godwin that first moved Malthus to write his book.

Born since the mid-1990s, members of Generation Z comprise the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation's candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast database of their astonishingly inventive lexicon to build a comprehensive picture of their values, daily lives, and outlook. Gen Z emerges here as an extraordinarily thoughtful, promising, and perceptive generation that is sounding a warning to their elders about the world around them--a warning of a complexity and depth the OK Boomer phenomenon can only suggest.
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Much of the existing literature about Gen Z has been highly judgmental. In contrast, this book provides a deep and nuanced understanding of a generation facing a future of enormous challenges, from climate change to civil unrest. What's more, they are facing this future head-on, relying on themselves and their peers to work collaboratively to solve these problems. As Gen Z, Explained shows, this group of young people is as compassionate and imaginative as any that has come before, and understanding the way they tackle problems may enable us to envision new kinds of solutions. This portrait of Gen Z is ultimately an optimistic one, suggesting they have something to teach all of us about how to live and thrive in this digital world.

In Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World, urban policy expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world's cities over the coming decades. What will it mean to have a world full of shrinking cities? Does it mean that they are doomed to decline in more ways than simply population numbers, or can we uncouple population decline from economic decay, abandoned buildings and impoverishment?

Mallach has spent much of the last thirty or more years working in, looking at, thinking, and writing about shrinking cities--from Trenton, New Jersey, where he was director of housing and economic development, to other American cities like Detroit, Flint, and St. Louis, and from there to cities in Japan and Central and Eastern Europe. He has woven together his experience, research, and analysis in this fascinating, realistic yet hopeful look at how smaller, shrinking cities can thrive, despite the daunting challenges they face.

Globally, women are having half as many children as they had just fifty years ago. Why have birth rates fallen, and how will low fertility affect our shared future?

In Decline and Prosper!, demographic expert Vegard Skirbekk offers readers an accessible, comprehensive and evidence-based overview of human reproduction. Readers learn about the evolution of childbearing across different populations and how fertility is related to (changes in) our reproductive capacity, contraception, education, religion, partnering, policies, economics, assisted reproduction, and catastrophes. Readers will explore the future of family size and its impact on human welfare, women's empowerment and the environment. Skirbekk argues that low fertility is on the whole a good thing, while recognizing the challenges of population aging and coincidental childlessness. A balanced, integrative examination of one of the most important issues of our time, Decline and Prosper! drives home the fact that we must ultimately adapt to a world with fewer children.

The book will be invaluable to anyone who is interested in the far-reaching effects of global fertility, including researchers and students of demography, social statistics, medical sociologists, family and childhood studies, human geographers, sociology of culture, social and public policy.

This demographic overview of North American Indian history describes in detail the holocaust that, even today, white Americans tend to dismiss as an unfortunate concomitant of Manifest Destiny. They wish to forget that, as Euro-Americans invaded North America and prospered in the New World, the numbers of native peoples declined sharply; entire tribes, often in the space of a few years, were wiped from the face of the earth.

The fires of the holocaust that consumed American Indians blazed in the fevers of newly encountered diseases, the flash of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of firewater, and the scorched-earth policies of the white invaders. Russell Thornton describes how the holocaust had as its causes disease, warfare and genocide, removal and relocation, and destruction of aboriginal ways of life.

Until recently most scholars seemed reluctant to speculate about North American Indian populations in 1492. In this book Thornton discusses in detail how many Indians there were, where they had come from, and how modern scholarship in many disciplines may enable us to make more accurate estimates of aboriginal populations.

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations--what the authors call secular cycles.

Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications.

An indispensable and groundbreaking resource for a wide variety of social scientists, Secular Cycles will interest practitioners of economic history, historical sociology, complexity studies, and demography.

Essential Demographic Methods brings to readers the full range of ideas and skills of demographic analysis that lie at the core of social sciences and public health. Classroom tested over many years, filled with fresh data and examples, this approachable text is tailored to the needs of beginners, advanced students, and researchers alike. An award-winning teacher and eminent demographer, Kenneth Wachter uses themes from the individual lifecourse, history, and global change to convey the meaning of concepts such as exponential growth, cohorts and periods, lifetables, population projection, proportional hazards, parity, marity, migration flows, and stable populations. The presentation is carefully paced and accessible to readers with knowledge of high-school algebra. Each chapter contains original problem sets and worked examples.

From the most basic concepts and measures to developments in spatial demography and hazard modeling at the research frontier, Essential Demographic Methods brings out the wider appeal of demography in its connections across the sciences and humanities. It is a lively, compact guide for understanding quantitative population analysis in the social and biological world.

Demography is not destiny. As Giacomo Casanova explained over two centuries ago: 'There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our own lives.'

Today we are shaping them and our societies more than ever before. Globally, we have never had fewer children per adult: our population is about to stabilize, though we do not know when or at what number, or what will happen after that. It will be the result of billions of very private decisions influenced in turn by multiple events and policies, some more unpredictable than others. More people are moving further around the world than ever before: we too often see that as frightening, rather than as indicating greater freedom. Similarly, we too often lament greater ageing, rather than recognizing it as a tremendous human achievement with numerous benefits to which we must adapt.

Demography comes to the fore most positively when we see that we have choices, when we understand variation and when we are not deterministic in our prescriptions. The study of demography has for too long been dominated by pessimism and inhuman, simplistic accounting. As this fascinating and persuasive overview demonstrates, how we understand our demography needs to change again.