This Week's Musings

The week that was, a couple thoughts:

- Sunday is the 15 year anniversary of 9/11.  I remember where I was that day.  I was a senior at Carleton College.  I was heading down to work at the telecommunications office where my manager told me that two planes hit two World Trade Center buildings.  I couldn't really digest that at first, but when I saw it on television, it hit me pretty quickly.  The destruction, the sadness, the utter pain that I saw is something that I will never forget.    

Since that time we've had a War on Terror that has waxed and waned.  Whether or not we're gaining the upper hand in that battle is a discussion for another day.  I'll just give you this myopic opinion.  I think that through the balance of time and weariness many of us have forgot the impact of that day.  We don't discuss it like we use to, we don't think about it like we use to and we certainly don't take it as somberly as we used to. Proof of this is a commercial that was recently broadcast at a Texas mattress store.

The times are a changin, aren't they?

- Talking about changing times, I recently read a report of a research paper of Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, which stated that while millennials are more politically polarized that the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers before them, they tend to identify to be more conservative than those generations at that same age. The data showed that, as entering college students, 23% of millennials identified as leaning far right, compared to 17% of Baby Boomers and 22% of Generation Xers.

If true, which I assume this has been empirically proven through rigorous research methods (10 million adults surveyed), one what wonder why this is important.  Well, let me show you this chart of the US voting electorate based off the Pew Research Center:

In short, the Baby Boomers are slowly dying off, the Gen Xers are holding steady since all of their generation are in the electorate and the Millennials are quickly becoming the dominate force in the electorate.  By the 2018 midterms, they will probably be the largest generation influencing American politics and public policy.   So the big questions are twofold (1) Are the Millennials actually voting? (2) Are they going to vote according to what this study says they might?   I guess we'll see soon enough.

My myopic opinion is that I'm not too sure if Millennial are not so much more conservative that those prior generations, but more libertarian.  From my experience, Millennials are pretty socially liberal, but have a very high distrust of government.  They want things done and they generally see government slow to act or unable to act correctly to address policy problems.  But again that's my myopic opinion.