Recommended Reading

I have but two recommended readings this week but they are both very good. I say “week” because I am going to be mostly offline for the next seven to ten days and will only have time to sporadically check in, so posting will be extremely light. My email response will also be, I say with all candor, very poor except for the most urgent business.

Scholar’s Stage – The Breakdown: The Young Aren’t Getting Enough Education

The Breakdown: Education Is More Necessary Than Ever

The Breakdown: Baby Boomers Have Higher Incomes

The Breakdown: Age and Employment

….Since the start of the current recession (or previous recession if you’re in the financial industry), we’ve read an almost constant stream of analyses, critiques, prognostications, and laments on the state of the economy. The preponderance of these took a sort of econophysics point of view, a view from 30,000 feet in which forces applied had deterministic outcomes. Local, regional, cultural, or demographic differences tend to be ignored.

I don’t think this view of behavioral or social phenomena is realistic and over the last few years I’ve repeatedly emphasized the local variants in the economic downturn and how that tends to obscure what’s actually going on nationally. Today I’m going to try to come up with an explanation of the changes in the economy that focuses on our changing demographics, particularly the differences among age cohorts. We’ll see how far I get.

A good place to start is with the graphic above. That’s what’s called the “age pyramid” for 2010. There are bars for each five year age cohort. The number of men for each cohort is shown on the left and the number of women on the right. It’s a straightforward visual snapshot that captures the country’s age and gender demographics in an eye-catching manner….

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: