the 10 Biggest Changes in the United States in Our Lifetimes
We have lived and are still living through tumultuous times. The America we inhabit today in many ways bears scant resemblance to the post-World War II world into which we were born.
So much has changed that it’s hard to fully grasp, let alone place it in any kind of order. But we have had a go at it. Here is our list, in ascending order, of the ten biggest changes in American life our generation has seen.
What do you think?
10. Non-European immigration soars.
The U.S. population, which has more than doubled during our lifetimes, has also become considerably more diverse.
It is not because of a radical increase in immigration. What has happened is that the immigrants who had primarily arrived from Europe in the 19th and early decades of the 20th century have been replaced in the last 75 years by those arriving from Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
According to the most recent numbers, 43 percent of legal immigrants to the United States now come from Asia while 27 percent have come from Latin America, excluding Mexico. And Mexicans are now overwhelmingly the largest immigrant group in the United States.
What this means is that non-Hispanic whites will make up barely one-half of the population by 2050 and the U.S. shortly after will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.
9. Poverty declines, but inequality increases.
In the late 1950s, the poverty rate in the U.S. was approximately 22 percent, meaning just shy of 40 million Americans qualified as impoverished. The rate has declined mostly steadily, reaching an all-time low of 10.5 percent in 2019, thanks to sustained economic growth and programs like Medicare and food stamps.
However, over the last 45 years—that is, since Ronald Reagan took office—the share of the pie has shrunk for everyone but the ultra-wealthy. This past September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent. In 1979, the first year the CBO reported the data, the disparity was only 12 to 1.
And the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households has soared. That is, just 18,300 U.S. households now control more than a tenth of the wealth of a nation of more than 130 million households.
And the bottom 50 percent? These 92 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.
8. America goes global.
The first commercial jet plane entered service in 1958. Instead of taking 15 hours, at best, to get from the east coast of the United States to Europe, we could now do it in just over six hours.
We could travel to even the most distant locations at previously unimaginable speeds and reasonable prices, making international travel no longer a perk of the wealthy, but something available to the middle class.
However, as worldwide transportation became easier, so did worldwide commerce. Products that had been made in Michigan and Pennsylvania could more cheaply be made in China and Pakistan, and easily transported to shops in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Cars made in Japan and Germany and then Korea started crowding out vehicles made in Detroit.
Consequently, the American economy became more focused on services rather than manufacturing and communities in what became known as the rust belt, where manufacturing had been centered, started to fall behind and lose population.
Meanwhile, American culture—rock ‘n’ roll, Hollywood movies, fast food and suburbs—spread around the globe.
7. The rise of youth, The end of formality.
With the post-war baby boom—more than 70 million of us were born in the United States from 1946 to 1964—came an inevitable focus on the concerns and interests of young people. That led to the rise of music specifically tailored to us—we called it rock ‘n’ roll—and an obsession with how young people looked, acted and communicated.
Ballroom dancing was replaced by doing your own thing on the dance floor. Suits and ties and dresses were replaced by blue jeans and t-shirts, leather shoes by sneakers or running shoes. Hair was less often sprayed or slicked back. Offices incorporated style elements pioneered in dorm rooms. Formal means of interaction—Mr., Mrs., Sincerely yours, pleased to meet you— were replaced by “hi,” “what’s up?” and, eventually, emojis.
Since the young tend to grasp new technologies more quickly than the old, their dominance of an increasingly technological culture—social media in particular—has continued. But a succession of new young generations long ago replaced the Baby Boomers in the avant-garde.
6. A drop in smoking, a rise in obesity.
Smoking had been everywhere, enveloping smokers and nonsmokers alike in fumes, ashtrays were ubiquitous, matches a constant concern. And let’s not forget the magazine advertisements informing us “that more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
If before 1950 there wasn’t conclusive evidence showing that cigarette smoking was bad for you, by the sixties—despite the efforts of the tobacco companies—we knew how dangerous it was to our health. The danger was eventually announced on cigarette packs and the lessons slowly but steadily taken to heart.
Smoking in the United States has declined dramatically since 1965, from nearly half the population to barely a tenth. The decrease has undoubtedly contributed, at least somewhat, to a rise in life expectancy—now almost 80 years, or about 12 years more than at World War II’s end.
But even though we are smoking less and many of us are exercising more, we are getting fatter. While just 13 percent of Americans qualified as obese in the early 1960s, more than 40 percent qualify today. The childhood obesity rate has tripled and almost 10 percent of Americans are considered “morbidly obese.”
No one is sure exactly why. But the proliferation of junk food and fast food certainly hasn’t helped. Nor has the triumph of the automobile and the decline in walking and outdoor play.
5. The waning of the Traditional family.
In 1955 only 2.5 of every thousand marriages in the United States ended in divorce. Today about 460 of every thousand end in divorce. And the rate is much higher for second and third marriages. Meanwhile, the average number of children per household was above two every year from 1960 to 1977. It has been below two every year since.
The America of mom, dad and two or three kids still exists, but increasingly it has been joined not only by dad and dad or mom and mom and a kid or two, but by mom or dad and a kid or two, or, frequently, by two adults of whatever gender without any kids around or contemplated.
4. The gains in LGBTQ rights.
Discrimination in employment, housing and other aspects of society against gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer people remained the rule in the United States through the 1990s and into the 21st century. Indeed, most LGBTQ people were forced to hide their loves, their sexuality—from employers, from landlords and often even from their families and friends.
Then, even more tragically, HIV/AIDS led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans—most of them gay—from the beginning of the epidemic in 1981 to the development of effective drugs in the 1990s.
In 1996 Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which unconscionably banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage by limiting the definition of marriage to the union of one man and one woman.
Nonetheless, acceptance of LGBTQ people and same-sex relationships and marriage—finally—spread with remarkable speed in this century. From 2004 to 2015, the year the Supreme Court required it, all 50 states legalized same-sex marriage.
And, as the 21st century progresses, young people are increasingly free to express or experiment with varying varieties of sexuality and sexual identity.
3. The Arrival of the Smart Phone (and its antecedents).
The personal computer was introduced in 1975, making access to data processing, word processing, spreadsheets and computation available to individuals, not just major companies who had the space and budget for massive machines. Eight years later, Motorola’s huge “Brick” phone demonstrated that it was possible, with low quality and great expense, to have a telephone in a car.
And then eight years after that, Tim Berners-Lee devised a method—the World Wide Web—of organizing information on what was originally a U.S. government system for connecting computers: the Internet. With PCs becoming relatively common by then, information finally could zip from one computer to another.
But the computer remained mostly on desks and the telephone remained mostly a voice-only device in homes, offices or phone booths until 2007, when Apple’s iPhone was introduced. Here was a small computer/telephone that could contact other telephones and hook up to the Internet.
These portable, tiny computers not only enabled people to talk to each other wherever they happened to be, they gave them the ability to send messages and mail to each other; they provided directions to wherever those who carried one wanted to go; they enabled them to take large numbers of high-quality photographs and video and send that to each other. And they enabled them, wherever they happened to be, to hook up, instantly, to the Internet and to something soon approaching the world’s entire supply of information, entertainments and news.
They have, according to social psychologists, rewired our brains and they’ve shifted the economy—and thus the importance of urban centers and how we choose where to live—by enabling many to work from home.
2. The Liberation of Women.
Yes, some women and some men are happy to forgo careers and stay at home. But our generation was born into a world where almost all women faced pressure to handle most of the childrearing and housework. When some of those women were able to enter the workforce, they were often restricted to being nurses not doctors, secretaries not executives.
And women were too often treated as sexual objects and denied sexual agency.
This changed—dramatically if still incompletely—in our lifetimes and has had effects that have reverberated through every corner of our society.
There are examples everywhere. In 1983, 23 percent of men 25 years old and older had a college degree; only 15 percent of women did. But the percentage of women with college degrees passed that of men in 2014 and has remained higher ever since. And, in a recent survey, while only 18 percent of physicians 65 and over were female, 60 percent of physicians under the age of 35 were.
Because of women’s new-found right to choose different pathways, the median age for women to get married for the first time is now 28.4 years compared to 20.1 years in the 1950s. That has perhaps also led, maybe directly, to the significant decline in the birthrate in the last 50 years.
1. The Civil Rights revolution.
Outright discrimination against African-Americans persisted well into our lifetimes—when Blacks still living in the South were still restricted to separate, and unequal, bus seats, water fountains, beaches, lunch counters, sports leagues and, yes, schools. Fairness wasn’t all that much more likely to be found up north, where “redlining” of their neighborhoods made it impossible for many Blacks to obtain mortgages and discrimination in housing, hiring and education remained common.
While there’s still a very long way to go, the treatment of African-Americans has significantly improved in our lifetimes: thanks to laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964; thanks to attempts at school integration, busing and a variety of additional anti-discrimination laws; thanks to affirmative action programs; and thanks to the untiring and courageous efforts of Black leaders, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Given the depth and the extent of the discrimination African Americans long faced—and the horrors of slavery in this country—America’s progress, however imperfect, in ending that discrimination has to rank as the most important development in the United States during our lifetimes.