Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

Times and mores have changed radically in 100 years The end is nigh. I'm not talking about nuclear meltdowns, planes falling out of the sky, gridwide blackouts or end-of-the-world infections by the millennium bug--none of which, we are reassured almost daily, will happen anyway. No, I mean the long rituals of anticipation and reminiscence that have gripped our culture as we've ground our way toward zero hour, an interminable stream of millennial hype that nothing short of Armageddon could justify. We have had to endure hundreds of biggest/best/most lists, time capsules, disaster flicks, TV retrospectives. During the '90s, we've been caught in that fin de sicle twilight, torn between a fixation on the future and an obsession with the past. We're either betting big money on the 21st century economy or totting up the wins and losses of the century past. Anticipation long ago turned to boredom, which in turn has become a yearning for relief. Now our long goodbye to the 20th century is almost over. What's the inconvenience of a few Y2K glitches compared to the consolation of knowing we'll never have to hear about the millennium again? Even so, when it comes to summing up the past 100 years, the best measurements are saved for last: the Statistical Abstract of the 20th century, released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week. Buried in these columns of dry figures are dozens of dramas that have unfolded since 1900: huge population growth, vast geographical shifts and seismic lifestyle changes that have produced an America that is more urban, more wealthy and more gray at the temples. It's worth noting at a time when teens have entire TV networks devoted to them and Harry Potter lords over the bestseller lists that, demographically speaking, the young as a group are shrinking in relationship to the population as a whole. In 1900, long before Nickelodeon or MTV, almost 42 percent of the population were between 5 and 24 years old; the average life expectancy was about 47. Back then, teens weren't consumers; they were workers. By contrast, 30 percent of the population was in that age range in 1998. As hungry marketers will tell you, that's plenty in absolute numbers. But as a percentage of the population, it represents a historical low for the century. The growth is coming at the other end of the chart: 65 and older. As the total population has quadrupled, the number of Americans in that group has increased ten-fold. And we ain't seen nothing yet. Graying America is the big story of the 21st century, a reality that, like the Y2K problem in 1996, everyone knows is coming. Our youth-obsessed culture and dickering politicians are just loathe to confront it. The other big story is women. In 1900, less than 800,000 women worked outside the home, compared to almost 34 million today. With just 114,000 divorced women in 1900, the only escape from a bad marriage was a husband's death. Unfortunately for women, however, it was more likely to happen the other way around: In 1915, 6l one of every 10,000 women died giving birth; in 1920, the figure was 80. (Today the ratio is less than one per 10,000.) Divorce, meanwhile, has grown a hundredfold. The Census Bureau's statistical portrait of our century explains our late-century yearning for "traditional values" and the reason that quest is doomed. The world that gave rise to those values has disappeared. In 1900, 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, only 24 percent do. (It's no coincidence that the 1920s, the first decade in which a majority lived in cities, was also the first golden age of marketing.) In 1950, 9 percent of households owned a TV set. By 1960, 85 percent did. From 1901 to 1910, the country absorbed 2 million Italian immigrants and 50,000 Mexicans. Finally, the statistics bring a little perspective to the preoccupation of the '90s: the stock market. In 1900, the New York Stock Exchange traded a laughable 139 million shares--far fewer than are traded on a single, very slow day at the end of the century. By 1929, the number of shares traded reached 1.25 billion, an almost tenfold increase--and you know what happened after that. Compare that to the leap from 1995, when the yearly volume was 87 billion, to 1998, when it doubled to 167 billion shares, more than 1,000 times the level at the beginning of the century. Will 20th-century history repeat itself in the 21st? Only the future will tell.

Brand Marketing

Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

Adweek Staff

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Adweek Staff