Summary: Demographic changes are the essence of social change. The composition of America’s population will change drastically during the next 50 years. We are not preparing for what is coming because we pretend nothing will happen.
(1) An equal distribution by age
Age distribution graphs were always some kind of pyramid. Ours will become a cylinder. This will be a unique event in history, with people over 60 roughly a third of the population – instead of a tiny fraction, as in pre-industrial societies. Children will be an unusually small fraction of the population. There will be fare fewer mothers (i.e., caring for young children) than ever before in history.
This new distribution of ages will radically change society’s dynamics in ways we cannot now imagine. To mention some of the big ones: fewer families, more elderly, and slower advancement up career leaders.
(2) A radically different racial/ethnic distribution
This graph from Pew Research shows the future of America. That is the most radical statement you will read today, or perhaps this year. Some react to it with emotional denial, as too scary to contemplate. Some react to it with idealistic denial, believing that it will be a wonderful peaceful multi-ethnic society – like in Zootopia.
My guess: people of the future will look back at the former group with contempt because they saw the problem but did nothing. They will regard the latter group as delusional loons.
Look at Generation Z, our future. Non-hispanic whites are half of Gen Z. That grossly overstates what their faction will be in the future. Open borders combined with whites’ lower fertility rates will make them a minority sometime in the next 20 – 30 years, with their fraction of the population continuing to shrink fast after that milestone.
Many of these immigrants have low education and skills. They are flooding into a nation with a surplus of such people (hence all the stories of desperate immigrants, esp. illegals, being abused by employers). They bring with them the beliefs that made their home nations so dysfunctional. When they come here, they change America as we change them. Even more so as many are coming from nations whose people assimilate slowly – and in numbers that result in slow assimilation (see the research here).
Lastly, we no longer have the strong mechanisms that “encouraged” assimilation in the generations before the borders were closed by FDR in the 1930s.
Conclusions
America will change beyond recognition during the next 50 years. The changed age distribution will force changes, their nature unknowable. The massive changes in racial and ethnic distribution, boosted by immigration, will more changes. My guess (guess!) is that America will change to more closely resemble Third World nations.
The combination, along with changes from normal social evolution and new technology, might destabilize America. The effects of that could be very bad. We can improve our odds by preparing, starting now.