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Millenials are promoting healthy eating habits in the U.S. as awareness among young people grows about faulty eating habits that have become commonplace in the U.S.  Words such as naturally grown, organic, sustainable, locally sourced are important in the way millennials demand their food, and grocery stores are listening. Millennials are also trying vegan and vegetarian options. Packaging has to be resealable, easy to open and portable. And when it comes to baby food millennials have definite preferences. 

The result is that variety and quality is improving on grocery market shelves.

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Digital nomad style of work life is shown in this WSJ report where young people get rid of their apartments and spend all their time working out of hotels in different cities around the world. With remote work becoming popular during the pandemic and accepted widely some young millenials are adopting this lifestyle.

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Bruni describes the situation facing Millenials in the U.S., a group of young people who face high student debt and few job opportunities, many stuck in jobs that do not match their qualifications. A similiar situation faces young people in Italy, Spain, France, the UK and other European countries. In South Asia there is an appalling lack of job opportunities to meet the aspirations of young people for a better life.

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The 2016 election will be decided by changing demographics and shifting coalitions between Democrats and Republicans. The changing demographics mean that a higher Latino vote in states such as Nevada, Colorado and Florida could bring these states to Democrats. And the working class vote in the industrial midwest in Ohio and the vote in some farm rural states such as Iowa could bring these states to Republicans. Michigan is another industrial midwest state which is uncertain as the older industrial centres such as Youngstown, Ohio, Scranton, Pennsylvania, and parts of Michigan- a big change from when unionized workers voted Democratic. The millenials, college educated women, and suburban voters in cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington are now part of a new Democratic coalition. Most striking is the way the electorate is divided between better educated and less educated, between men and women, and between young and older voters. In fact with the conservative cultural emphasis in the Republican platform older voters are looking back to bringing back the 50's, while Democrats and the younger generation are looking forward to the future in this election. This is not an accurate characterization though because in 1948 with Harry Truman and in 1952 and 1956 with Dwight Eisenhower America was changing rapidly and looking to the future, so that by 1960 the civil rights movement was already established, and women were making the transition to being college educated and working in business and government.   ...

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Prof. Twenge of San Diego State University says teens in the iGeneration are so different from the Millenials and previous generations, that in her research she has not seen anything quite like it. This generation of teens experienced the use of smartphones and social media at a young age in a way no previous generation has. More time was spent on smartphones than with peers face to face, and less time was spent with family, more time alone. This has led to mental health risks for teenagers.

Melinda Gates describes her experience with her children growing up with smartphones and the risks involved. Parents are in a great deal of confusion on how to handle this situation even as it is changing their children's lives in ways never experienced before, putting them more at risk.

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A new generation of young people born between 1995 to 2012 get the name iGen. It makes up 24% of the population in the U.S. San Diego State University Prof. Twenge describes this group of young people as open and tolerant but very casual about most things, and not literate in comparison to the Millenials and previous generations of young people. They are tolerant to LGBT and transgender, not church going,  and at the same time can be intolerant of other opinions than their own. One of four students in this group says someone who says something insensitive about race can be fired. This group also does not try to look deeper to obtain a better understanding. Virtual relationships are preferred to social relationships. They tend to spend about 6 hours on technology devices such as smartphones and social media outlets. They interact less and yet do not find time for reading, and read much less than GenX or Millenials, or baby boomers. Twenge says they are less informed about current events and their academic skills lag behind that of Millenials. Not that this is a good place they have found, as the more time they spend on the internet the worse they feel. Making them less happy than other generations of young people before them who had face to face interaction instead of endless hours on social media. The reviewer is skeptical of what is happening here, saying that the use of technology devices in this way has stunted their development in ways one could not imagine possible. Not let them develop the skills of previous generations of young people who did not have these devices and lived a simpler life with face to face interaction. ...

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Millenials are moving away from political parties to look at individual candidates in 2014. Attitudes are changing moving away from gender politics. A Pew Research Center survey of March 2014 shows 50% of millenials consider themselves political independents. And 31% believe there is not much difference between Democrats and Republicans.

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Dagmar Breitenbach of DW.com  discusses today's youth in an interview with Albert Wunsch, author of the book "The Pampering Trap." Wunsch is a psychologist and education expert, who says today's youth lack the perseverance of their parent's generation. When confronted with difficult situations today's young people in Germany are seen as lacking maturity, persistence, and patience. Part of the problem is that parents have shielded their children from life's realities, says Wunsch. Parents want to be their kid's friends, and not act like an authority figure. In Germany authority figures still have the taint of looking bad, and parent shy away from that perception. The avoidance of conflict, including constructive conflict leaves children and youth at a disadvantage, because they go through life not having had to experience difficulties and learn from these experiences. Lacking this sensible kind of conflict in which parents have to ask themselves what is of value that they can transfer, the transfer of what one generation has learned is not being transferred to the next. Another problem is that young people prefer to hedge, not make commitments, says Wunsch. Financial literacy on how to manage money is also at a lower level. Some of these problems are mentioned for young people in America in the best selling book by Ben Sasse- "The Vanishing American Adult." Developments in Germany are also evident in other places. The dropout rate in Germany is also high. Studies cited here show this to be about 25% to 33% of college students dropping out.   ...

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The decline in the U.S. television advertising market accelerates in 2015. Viacom Inc. (Nickeodeon and MTV) sees a decline in TV domestic advertising revenue of 9% for the 2nd quarter of 2015, as its TV ratings decline. CBS Corp and Disney (ESPN) see a 3% decline. 21st century Fox with FOX network and shows such as "American Idol" and "The Following," sees a large decline in its television ad revenue of 14%. In the week of August 4-6, 2015, the share prices of these media companies were hit hard. Viacom shares declined by 21%, Fox 13%, Disney 11%. Earlier gains for digital ad revenue were from print, now the gains are at the expense of television budgets. Companies such as Allstate, Mondelez, Wendy's, MasterCard, Honda, P&G, are shifting to digital from television to follow millenials. Experts at ad buying firms say advertisers are tracking young consumers and following them to digital platforms. Viacom's Nickelodeon and MTV are hit particularly hard by the growing shift to kids shows on Netflix and to You Tube, and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Linear TV and interruptions for advertising is also accelerating the move, when other ad free or less advertising options are now easily available. By 2018 the digital ad spending will overtake television ad spending, digital getting $83 billion and television dropping to $78.6 billion....

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The most important segment with future implications for growth is the young people segment, and here American companies are really weak. Of the "millenials" or people born between 1979 and 1985, those who consider a Ford when shoppng for a small car are only 7%. These are Ford's own numbers according to the Wall Street Journal. Ford and GM are moving their emphasis to small cars. Ford did this at the Los Angeles Auto Show with the new Fiesta arrriving in the market in early 2010, and GM will compete with the Honda Civic with its Chevy Cruze due in August in showrooms. To do this Ford and GM are remodeling their showrooms. To do this 3000 Chevy stores are taking on a new focus on small cars and 26,000 sales people are being retrained by end of 2009. Kurt Mcneil, Chevy's sales chief, says their emphasis is on giving a good response to online customers by having salespeople able to talk fluently about fuel efficiency and compare with Honda and Toyota. For Chevy the showroom remodeling involves having a greeter at the reception desk not a salesperson, this is who one first sees when walking into a dealership. The improvements costing $200,000 to $600,000 per location are being paid by dealers with GM offering financial incentives for the work. The way Ford is approaching it is to use social media like Facebook to a bigger extent. It will send a social media consultant to its largest 800 dealerships or one fourth of all stores to build an online infrastructure to connect to local buyers and offer online updates, videos, and games related to small cars. Ford, GM and Chrysler have only 21% of the small car market, according to Autodata, and Ford has only the aging Focus to offer today. In 10 months of 2009, 19% of 8.65 millon light vehicles sold were small cars up from 14% in 2006, while the percentages for SUV and pickups dropped 53% to 46%. ...

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Monica Hesse gives this exceptional story of Gladys Ament, which is the story of American women as they voted in election after election after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920. In 2016 she is 96 years old and used an absentee ballot to vote for a first women president for the U.S.. Ament gives this touching and graceful account of a woman who lived through many presidents, and never failed to exercize her vote in every election held since the day she was born on Aug. 26, 1920. That day Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment giving it the majority needed to become the law of the land. This was the year Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was in office. Her story starts in a two room schoolhouse in Lonaconing, Maryland, population 2054, when America was largely rural and rapidly urbanizing. The girls did the housework and the boys worked in the coal country, and women were not considered to be the ones in the home to go to a college or university. She dated a man who worked for the phone company, and later was drafted in the war. She joined Montgomery Ward filling catalogue orders. Her first vote was for FDR in 1944, in reality for Eleanor Roosevelt. And then she voted for Harry Truman, who she liked for his plain talk manner. Then Eisenhower, Nixon, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, as she fulfilled the role of a mother and teachers aide at a school for special needs children. Her husband was not sure her daughter Mary needed to follow the two sons to college, but she made sure Mary did even though tution money was tight. She loved the self-respect which came with working, she was patient. The opportunities came and it was Mary who pursued her education and became an administrator who also supervised men. Things had changed, nobody thought of it twice, what Gladys had struggled with was now the accepted way of things. Then came a granddaughter and by this time young women had more opportunities, and there were as many women in universities as men. Gladys voted for the first black president and then for a first woman president at 96, 96 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote in America. After that election in which she really voted for Eleanor Roosevelt- who was all over the country making speeches and talking to people to bring hope during the Depression years- she could see the potential in a next woman as president. She had seen some of the 18 presidents who had led the country as good leaders and some not so good, some who were seen as good in their years in office but later seen as having done poorly, she could see that women could do just as well or better after all these years of her voting and learning. ...

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The sixth Republican presidential debate in Jan. 2016 showed the main exchanges between Trump and Cruz, with some points made by Christie. The rest of the candidates Rubio, Kasich, Bush, Carson, made little headway. As Dan Balz points out in the Washington Post the Republican primaries look like a contest between Cruz and Trump, both anti-establishment candidates, both tapping into grass roots anger at the Obama administration and at establishment Republicans.

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This NYT editorial provides statistics for the problems of young people facing high student debt, high unemployment, and working in jobs that do not require their educational qualifications. Federal Reserve data show 44% of young college graduates in 2012 working at jobs that did not require a college degree. Underemployment stands at 16.8% in the U.S.- this includes young people too discouraged to look for work and those stuck in part time jobs. Put another way the hope that existed in the 1970's for a better future is simply lacking. The boom, bust, and corrective policy preceding and following the 2000 and 2008 crises have acted as a huge distraction for needed policy steps and imposed additional penalties on young people, just as other trends in the globalized manufacturing and IT industry were shifting jobs overseas.

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Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, says the Obama plan for ratings of colleges in the U.S. will not add much value because much of the information is already available. More important she says is to tackle the bad actors in education leading to high student debt. She says she will cut costs by a couple of hundred million dollars in the next few years, and will keep pushing on costs as there is a natural tendency to revert back. With less state support the UC system is admitting a larger number of students from out of state who pay higher tution.

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The US needs 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. And 7.2 million jobs have been lost since December 2007. Where will the new jobs come from to replace lost jobs in retail, banking auto and other job losing sectors and when, and will some jobs never come back. Global Insight forecast show 8.1% unemployment in 2013, suggesting that jobs needed for population growth and some jobs from the pool of job losses will not be recovered for some years.

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U.S. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Tim Scott describe the event on poverty organized by the Jack Kemp Foundation in Jan. 2016, in which both Congressmen are moderators. Ryan and Scott point out the importance of upward educational and economic mobility for working class and middle class people. The 2 Republican leaders say education, work, opportunity and accountability for federal spending in anti-poverty programs are critical parts of their program for addressing the problem. They suggest trying different solutions by giving states more opportunity to try different solutions.

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Seib points out why the current political landscape with the popularity of Trump and Sanders reflects demographic, economc and social changes in America compared to when Geroge H.W. Bush won the election in 1988 and Bill Clinton won in 1992. The Republican party is more populist, with older Americans, more Southern and conservative, making it harder for Jeb Bush or Wall Street backed candidates. The Democratic Party more liberal, more popular on both the east and west coast of the U.S., with younger Americans, diverse demographic groups, making it harder for Hillary Clinton as an establishment candidate. A Journal/NBC poll of Oct. 2015 shows 28% of Republicans describing their views as very conservative, and 26% of Democrats saying they are very liberal. Yet there is another aspect that will show up once the primaries are over. And this is the steady group of somewhat conservative and moderate combined in the Republican Party of 64%, and the steady group of somewhat liberal and moderate in the Democratic Party of 62% in the 2015 Journal/NBC poll. The moderates are up from 26% in the above 1990 poll to 31% in the 2015 poll for the Republican Party, and from 26% to 33% in the Democratic Party. So that one sees about a quarter of people polled in each party pushing for fringe views and a countervailing trend for moderate or close to moderate views with about two thirds support in the 2015 Journal/NBC poll for each party....