The election of Bobby Jindal as governor of the US state of Louisiana has been greeted exultantly by Indians and Indian-Americans around the world. There’s no question that this is an extraordinary accomplishment: a young Indian-American, just 36 years old, not merely winning an election but doing so on the first ballot by receiving more votes than his 11 rivals combined, and that too in a state not noticeably friendly to minorities. Bobby Jindal will now be the first Indian-American governor in US history, and the youngest currently serving chief executive of an American state. These are distinctions of which he can legitimately be proud, and it is not surprising that Indians too feel a vicarious sense of shared pride in his remarkable ascent.
But is our pride misplaced? Who is Bobby Jindal and what does he really stand for? There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Indian migrants in America: though no sociologist, i’ll call them the atavists and the assimilationists. The atavists hold on to their original identities as much as possible, especially outside the workplace; in speech, dress, food habits, cultural preferences, they are still much more Indian than American. The assimilationists, on the other hand, seek assiduously to merge into the American mainstream; they acquire a new accent along with their visa, and adopt the ways, clothes, diet and recreational preferences of the Americans they see around them. (Of course, there are the in-betweens, but we’ll leave them aside for now.) Class has something to do with which of the two major categories an Indian immigrant falls into; so does age, since the newer generation of Indians, especially those born in America, inevitably tend to gravitate to the latter category.
Bobby Jindal is an assimilationist’s dream. Born to relatively affluent professionals in Louisiana, he rejected his Indian name (Piyush) as a very young child, insisting that he be called Bobby, after a (white) character on the popular TV show ‘The Brady Bunch’. His desire to fit in to the majority-white society he saw around him soon manifested itself in another act of rejection: Bobby spurned the Hindusim into which he was born and, as a teenager, converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith of most white Louisianans. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of this, and it is a measure of his precocity that his parents did not balk at his wishes despite his extreme youth. The boy was clearly gifted, and he soon had a Rhodes scholarship to prove it. But he was also ambivalent about his identity: he wanted to be seen as a Louisianan, but his mirror told him he was also an Indian. The two of us won something called an ‘Excelsior Award’ once from the Network of Indian Professionals in the US, and his acceptance speech on the occasion was striking — obligatory references to the Indian values of his parents, but a speech so American in tone and intonation that he mangled the Indian name of his own brother. There was no doubt which half of the hyphen this Indian-American leaned towards.
But there are many ways to be American, and it’s interesting which one Bobby chose. Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathise with other people of colour, identifying their lot with other immigrants, the poor, the underclass. Vinita Gupta, in Oklahoma, another largely white state, won her reputation as a crusading lawyer by taking up the case of illegal immigrants exploited by a factory owner (her story will shortly be depicted by Hollywood, with Halle Berry playing the Indian heroine). Bhairavi Desai leads a taxi drivers’ union; Preeta Bansal, who grew up as the only non-white child in her school in Nebraska, became New York’s Solicitor General and now serves on the Commission for Religious Freedom. None of this for Bobby. Louisiana’s most famous city, New Orleans, was a majority black town, at least until Hurricane Katrina destroyed so many black lives and homes, but there is no record of Bobby identifying himself with the needs or issues of his state’s black people. Instead, he sought, in a state with fewer than 10,000 Indians, not to draw attention to his race by supporting racial causes. Indeed, he went well beyond trying to be non-racial (in a state that harboured notorious racists like the Ku Klux Klansman David Duke); he cultivated the most conservative elements of white Louisiana society.
With his widely-advertised piety (he asked his Indian wife, Supriya, to convert as well, and the two are regular churchgoers), Bobby Jindal adopted positions on hot-button issues that place him on the most conservative fringe of the Republican Party. Most Indian-Americans are in favour of gun control, support a woman’s right to choose abortion, advocate immigrants’ rights, and oppose school prayer (for fear that it would marginalise non-Christians). On every one of these issues, Bobby Jindal is on the opposite side. He’s not just conservative; on these questions, he is well to the right of his own party. That hasn’t stopped him, however, from seeking the support of Indian-Americans. Bobby Jindal has raised a small fortune from them, and when he last ran (unsuccessfully) for governor in 2004, an army of Indian-American volunteers from outside the state turned up to campaign for him. Many seemed unaware of his political views; it was enough for them that he was Indian. At his Indian-American fundraising events, Bobby is careful to downplay his extreme positions and play up his heritage, a heritage that plays little part in his appeal to the Louisiana electorate. Indian-Americans, by and large, accept this as the price of political success in white America: it’s just good to have “someone like us” in such high office, whatever views he professes to get himself there. So Indians beam proudly at another Indian-American success story to go along with Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, Hargobind Khorana and Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, Kal Penn and Jhumpa Lahiri. But none of these Indian Americans expressed attitudes and beliefs so much at variance with the prevailing values of their community.
Let us be proud that a brown-skinned man with an Indian name has achieved what Bobby Jindal has. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that we should be proud of what he stands for.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/SHASHI_ON_SUNDAY/Should_we_be_proud_of_Bobby_Jindal/articleshow/2495846.cms
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Internet revolution reaches India's poor
By Anand Giridharadas
International Herald TribuneThursday, October 11, 2007
Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, workmen like Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients' computers on the job here.So you can imagine Manohar's wonder as he sat dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary who entered them into a computer. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Manohar's very own social-networking page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on Babajob.com.
Babajob, an Indian start-up aiming to bring the Facebook/MySpace revolution to the world's poor, is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: Entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor.
Outsourcing brought hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of techies to Bangalore. Now, more than a decade into the outsourcing surge, many of those companies and their employees are applying their skills not just to developing software, but to confronting the grinding poverty around them too."In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's Washington State headquarters, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, 'What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?' "Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive effects for the poor, corporations have made India a lab for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultracheap cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special ATM that recognizes thumbprints to help slum-dwellers who struggle with personal identification numbers. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group that is studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.
Babajobs is a quintessential example of how Indian back offices have spawned poverty-inspired innovation. The best-known networking sites connect the computer-savvy elite to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects the Indian elite to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through "friend-of-a-friend" networks.For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can surf onto Rajeev's page, travel onto the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and then see which of the chauffeur's friends happen to be looking for similar work.
Blagsvedt, 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago, he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company's in-house institute.But the Microsoft employees who worked here led very different lives than their counterparts back home. They had servants and laborers. They read newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy. The Indian employees were not seeing such conditions for the first time, but many of them felt newly empowered to confront them.Equipped with world-class computing skills, many felt an urge to do something to help their society.At the same time, Microsoft, with software piracy limiting revenues in India, was looking to low-income consumers as a vast commercial opportunity, so engineers' altruistic urges were encouraged.
In Blagsvedt's research office, poverty became a major focus. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. One day, in the course of that work, Blagsvedt stumbled on an insight by a Duke University economist that first unnerved and then inspired him.The economist, Anirudh Krishna, found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover such jobs. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.
Blagsvedt's epiphany? "We need village LinkedIn!" he recalled saying, referring to a professional networking site. He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague, built a social-networking site to connect the yuppies of Bangalore with its wage laborers. (The site, which Blagsvedt began this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore for now, with plans to spread to other Indian cities and perhaps globally.)Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers in general and with Babajob in particular. Moreover, wealthy employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend to their gardens or their newborns.
To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, to find job seekers and register them. (Babajob earns its keep from employers' advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who sign up job seekers.) Also, instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: using chains of personal connections.In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend's chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.
To recreate this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be "connectors" between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman's friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he likes.The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Blagsvedt."Wow," said Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, when told of the company. "It is an important innovation," he said, "because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them."Krishna, the Duke economist, praised the idea as a "very significant innovation," but he cautioned that the very poor may not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob.
In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers out into the streets with fliers promising employment.When it comes to potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also counting on Babalife, the company's parallel social networking site. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, as well.So far, more than 1,100 have registered on Babajob. The listings are a portrait of the floating underclass in India, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was desperate. "I am really in need of a job, as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura," she said, referring to a disaster in July that killed two people, including an infant, according to The Times of India.I
n Blagsvedt's apartment, Manohar, the painter, professed hope. He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, and so he spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. They levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.Manohar wants his three children to walk a different path. They must not know his pain, he said; they should work in a nice office. So he spends nearly half his income on private schooling for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer screen, dreaming of more work.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/10/asia/jobs.php
International Herald TribuneThursday, October 11, 2007
Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, workmen like Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients' computers on the job here.So you can imagine Manohar's wonder as he sat dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary who entered them into a computer. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Manohar's very own social-networking page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on Babajob.com.
Babajob, an Indian start-up aiming to bring the Facebook/MySpace revolution to the world's poor, is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: Entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor.
Outsourcing brought hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of techies to Bangalore. Now, more than a decade into the outsourcing surge, many of those companies and their employees are applying their skills not just to developing software, but to confronting the grinding poverty around them too."In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's Washington State headquarters, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, 'What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?' "Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive effects for the poor, corporations have made India a lab for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultracheap cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special ATM that recognizes thumbprints to help slum-dwellers who struggle with personal identification numbers. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group that is studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users.
Babajobs is a quintessential example of how Indian back offices have spawned poverty-inspired innovation. The best-known networking sites connect the computer-savvy elite to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects the Indian elite to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through "friend-of-a-friend" networks.For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can surf onto Rajeev's page, travel onto the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and then see which of the chauffeur's friends happen to be looking for similar work.
Blagsvedt, 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago, he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company's in-house institute.But the Microsoft employees who worked here led very different lives than their counterparts back home. They had servants and laborers. They read newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy. The Indian employees were not seeing such conditions for the first time, but many of them felt newly empowered to confront them.Equipped with world-class computing skills, many felt an urge to do something to help their society.At the same time, Microsoft, with software piracy limiting revenues in India, was looking to low-income consumers as a vast commercial opportunity, so engineers' altruistic urges were encouraged.
In Blagsvedt's research office, poverty became a major focus. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. One day, in the course of that work, Blagsvedt stumbled on an insight by a Duke University economist that first unnerved and then inspired him.The economist, Anirudh Krishna, found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover such jobs. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.
Blagsvedt's epiphany? "We need village LinkedIn!" he recalled saying, referring to a professional networking site. He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague, built a social-networking site to connect the yuppies of Bangalore with its wage laborers. (The site, which Blagsvedt began this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore for now, with plans to spread to other Indian cities and perhaps globally.)Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers in general and with Babajob in particular. Moreover, wealthy employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend to their gardens or their newborns.
To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, to find job seekers and register them. (Babajob earns its keep from employers' advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who sign up job seekers.) Also, instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: using chains of personal connections.In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend's chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.
To recreate this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be "connectors" between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman's friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he likes.The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Blagsvedt."Wow," said Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, when told of the company. "It is an important innovation," he said, "because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them."Krishna, the Duke economist, praised the idea as a "very significant innovation," but he cautioned that the very poor may not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob.
In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers out into the streets with fliers promising employment.When it comes to potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also counting on Babalife, the company's parallel social networking site. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, as well.So far, more than 1,100 have registered on Babajob. The listings are a portrait of the floating underclass in India, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was desperate. "I am really in need of a job, as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura," she said, referring to a disaster in July that killed two people, including an infant, according to The Times of India.I
n Blagsvedt's apartment, Manohar, the painter, professed hope. He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, and so he spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. They levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.Manohar wants his three children to walk a different path. They must not know his pain, he said; they should work in a nice office. So he spends nearly half his income on private schooling for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer screen, dreaming of more work.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/10/asia/jobs.php
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
The Odyssey years
International Herald Tribune
Brooks: The Odyssey years
By David Brooks
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there's bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don't even detect a clear sense of direction in their children's lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.
They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They're delaying children. They're delaying permanent employment. Americans who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments - moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of American 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
Yet with a little imagination it's possible even for baby boomers - the 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 - to understand what it's like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It's possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.
Two of America's best social scientists have been trying to understand this new life phase. William Galston of the Brookings Institution has recently completed a research project for the Hewlett Foundation. Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has just published a tremendously valuable book, "After the Baby Boomers," that looks at young adulthood through the prism of religious practice.
Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don't apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it's at 21 percent.)
The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don't find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.
Social life is fluid. There's been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers.
Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.
This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they're working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.
The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.
Rather, what we're seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It's a phase in which some social institutions flourish - knitting circles, Teach for America - while others - churches, political parties - have trouble establishing ties.
But there is every reason to think this phase will grow more pronounced in the coming years. European nations are traveling this route ahead of Americans, Galston notes. Europeans delay marriage even longer than Americans do and spend even more years shifting between the job market and higher education.
And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by "Friends" and later by "Knocked Up."
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=7815532
Brooks: The Odyssey years
By David Brooks
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there's bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don't even detect a clear sense of direction in their children's lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.
They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They're delaying children. They're delaying permanent employment. Americans who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments - moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of American 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
Yet with a little imagination it's possible even for baby boomers - the 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 - to understand what it's like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It's possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.
Two of America's best social scientists have been trying to understand this new life phase. William Galston of the Brookings Institution has recently completed a research project for the Hewlett Foundation. Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has just published a tremendously valuable book, "After the Baby Boomers," that looks at young adulthood through the prism of religious practice.
Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don't apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it's at 21 percent.)
The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don't find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.
Social life is fluid. There's been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers.
Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.
This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they're working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.
The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.
Rather, what we're seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It's a phase in which some social institutions flourish - knitting circles, Teach for America - while others - churches, political parties - have trouble establishing ties.
But there is every reason to think this phase will grow more pronounced in the coming years. European nations are traveling this route ahead of Americans, Galston notes. Europeans delay marriage even longer than Americans do and spend even more years shifting between the job market and higher education.
And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by "Friends" and later by "Knocked Up."
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=7815532
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