By John Zogby

Continuing my journey in Prague, I had a salon with members of the Young Presidents’ Organization chapter and senior leadership of Vaclav Havel’s Forum 2000 – a group of 25. The questions, as always, were varied. They wanted to know about President Obama’s recent visit to Prague, prospects for peace in the Middle East, and how long I thought this Great Recession might last. But we spent a lot of time again on the First Globals™.

One strand of our discussion related to the future of family. If mobility is the force behind First Globals™, what will bring stability to their lives? Will there be rules that tie them down? Will they regard parents as useful once they are exposed to more and more new technologies, new places, and new peoples that their parents have never experienced? Will there even be family meals? These questions were especially asked by younger parents. And I like being put on the spot in these kinds of situations: I need to be spontaneous, need to see the polling data flash before me, and need to provide answers to very complex concerns. I also like emphasizing the role I have spent for most of my adult life: an historian.

New changes in economies have always necessitated super-structural adjustments. Priests didn’t have to pray all day and night for the good hunt if the tribe had turned to agricultural and trade to sustain themselves. The role of women changed with the onset of agricultural economies. Feudal hierarchies no longer were relevant in dynamic economies based on investment, trade, large production, and the exchange of money. Children were needed to work in the fields to help seed and harvest for survival – but who was going to watch the kids when parents had to go into factories owned by someone else?

So adjustments have always had to be made with new economies. Back in the early 1990s I was asked to teach two courses in media and communications and I remember being a near-ranting Luddite about new communications technologies. The proliferation of the “personal computer” would atomize us humans, separating and isolating us from each other. I was greatly aided in my rants by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – a still important jeremiad against new media. But I was so wrong. I underestimated my species’ need and capacity to build new communities, to seek out virtual relationships that were professional, fun, and even amorous. Like Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, a wonderful work of sociology that decries the loss of the public square and the village green, I guess I forgot back then that men and women will always need sociability and conviviality. And we have found it.

Just like the family. It is evolving. Those who want to keep the nuclear family intact play a useful role, but forget that the nuclear-size family is only a recent phenomenon. If change is so bad then should we bring back the tribe and tribal warfare? Do we really want all of our aunts and uncles and their offspring living happily under one extended family roof? The family is evolving and where it stops I just don’t know – but even then the new form will only be for a short while.

By John Zogby

There were lots of questions and discussion from the next two groups in Prague about First Globals™. I was ably assisted by my son, Jeremy, who moderated both discussions. The first group was a chapter of Generation Next, about 20 or so First Globals™ themselves. They were university graduate and undergraduate students along with young professionals. They were Czech, Indian, Pakistani, Arab, and British.
�
They were curious about their American counterparts. What made me so hopeful that American First Globals™ would eschew American nationalism and militarism? What if the U.S. were attacked again? Wouldn’t they turn inward and provincial? I’m happy to get questions like this because I can use real data to speculate on the trends and the future. To be sure, while not global in their outlook, the 20-somethings of the insular and isolationist 1930s U.S. changed from being typical to becoming the super-patriotic Greatest Generation of World War II — the change occurred with Pearl Harbor. But today’s young men and women did witness the attacks of September 11, 2001 and reacted in far different way. In fact, they turned even more outward. They have taken advantage of newer technologies and enter networks with friends and acquaintances without borders. They are curious about different cultures. They are the only American age cohort that does not believe that American culture is inherently superior to the cultures of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. They are the most likely to want to learn about Muslims.
�
This is a global sensibility they will carry with them into their thirties and forties. Obviously no can predict what would happen in the face of another terrorist attack, but the values, experiences, and sensitivities of this group suggest plenty of reasons to be hopeful that the U.S. will not enter a new insular or militarist phase.

By John Zogby

When I met with more than 300 members of the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco they had as much to say as I did. One gentleman challenged my “overall premise” that the American Dream was evolving away from its more traditional materialist definition to something more spiritual – a quest for a genuine life, something larger than where we work, what we own, and how much we make. His thought was that this nation is defined by its freedoms, by the quest to get away from tyranny in all of its forms – thus the American Dream was already spiritual and not one dimensional as he felt I portrayed it.

I think I shocked him when I agreed with him. To be sure, the Dream has been about liberty, independence, a break from the old feudal world and its prohibitive categories. But the concept of America has also had much to do with opportunity – the pursuit of happiness – and that is much of what defined our mystique from the pre-settler explorers who reported about the continent’s bountiful resources. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Tom Paine portrayed a future empire based on both freedom and opportunity. And the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries wrote their famed “America letters” to family at home – which were read aloud to villagers who gathered en masse—about streets paved with gold and how a poor man could grow up to be president. We have been, in the words of the great historian David M. Potter, a “people of plenty” and in so many ways that is what has defined us and what settled our frontiers. It is also the story of American mobility and the post-World War II expansion.

In my book I tell a parable first told to me by a terrific graduate history professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. In short form, it is about two men staring at Walden Pond on a cold day in February 1843. One man, Walden’s most famous (and to the best information we have, the ONLY) resident saw the freezing water for its natural beauty and the inner peace man achieved from being one with the elements. The essence of America was the opportunity to renew our spirit without being fettered by burdensome systems. The other man was Frederick Tudor, a prominent manufacturer of ice, who saw a different value in the pristine water – and again the opportunity to pursue his dream unfettered. Both dreams make this country.

For a variety of reasons, which I address in both my book and my speeches, the Thoreau version of Dream is on the upswing. First, more than one in four Americans work at a job that pays less than a previous job. This has been developing for the past two decades and it has necessitated a refocusing of priorities. Second, there are nine to 10 million Americans who have done very well financially but who want to end the chase. There is an active and engaged “simplification” movement in this country and, while not all of this group are card-carrying members of this movement, their behavior is consistent with it as they conclude that they mainly have enough (or too much!), are giving up to one third of their stuff away, and are downsizing their lives and material expectations. Third, there are Baby Boomers – I call us “Woodstockers,” steeped in self-indulgence – who are so badly in need of a second act (since we reached the highpoint of our lives when we changed the world at 19). Our redemption will come from “encore living,” as we realize that about one million of us will probably reach the age of 100 and many of us have 25 to 30 years of healthy living ahead of us. Our predecessors, The Private Generation, are redefining retirement by teaching, mentoring, coaching, traveling, learning, and living a full and spiritually rewarding later life. Imagine this trend continuing when millions of Woodstockers are unleashed on the world doing “vol-work” – to use the great term coined by historian Robert Fogel.

Finally, we Americans are ready for more sacrifices. This is so much what our history is about – including the last three decades. While the bigger story was about gas guzzling cars and waste, my polling shows how much we now have absorbed energy-saving into our regular habits, how we have incorporated non-littering, non-smoking, and recycling into our daily lives. And our kids have learned well from us. They are ready to be good global citizens.

So the American Dream has indeed changed … and will continue to develop in this direction.

By John Zogby

Pacific Coast Builders Conference members are engaged in the building of single and multi-family dwellings, so they were very concerned about the future of their market. Building is slow, credit is slower, and California and Arizona, their two largest states, are in a huge slump. Talk about simplification and of downsizing our lives can be troubling unless adjustments are made. But they zeroed in on questions about First Globals — the youngest demographic I deal with in my research. I told them about this group’s passion for mobility, for travel, for not wanting to be tied down to a single place or roots. Needless to say, this portrayal raised some queries. Won’t they settle down in 30s and 40s like every other age cohort? Won’t they marry, buy homes, plant roots, and raise families like everyone else? What is the future of housing? Of economic development? Of the family?
�
Great questions, especially poignant in the middle of the terrible housing slump we are in. First Globals will love, marry, and raise kids. But it may be quite different. My friend Richard Florida suggests that we need to encourage mobility, foster the clustering of young creatives in central cities where they can share ideas, be energized by each other, and grow businesses and lives together in the exchange of free ideas. Florida even suggests in a wonderful piece in Atlantic magazine that government policy should not encourage home ownership but rather new forms of housing policy that promote mobility. I think he is right, not simply because it makes sense and is innovative, but also because this responds to the very culture that First Globals define for themselves. Tomorrow’s 30-year-old will have already had four jobs; the First Global at 40 will have had 10 jobs. Jobs will not be long term. There will be projects, then transitions to new places and new contracts, and so on. They will be on the move. They will love and marry, but more and more relationships will be long distance, virtual, and intense. Kids will be on the road and “home schooled”. These are the lives of our Globals.
�
Will they buy homes? Probably short-term leases with options to buy. Sound familiar? That is how many obtain cars — the ultimate definition of mobility in our society. Speaking of cars, housing swaps will take place as First Globals will enter into arrangements within their networks to trade and share homes to foster easier transitions. (Watch the flex-car really take off in the next few years).
�
So “yes” to housing, love, marriage, kids, etc. but it will be just very different. Personally, I think it is exciting — especially if I get to see my grandchildren (when I get them).