"The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream"
by John Zogby
Random House, 235 pp., $26
BOOK REVIEW
Dismissing a crystal-ball book by a professional canvasser would be easy. After all, generalizing about a diverse body politic of ccc million people based on samples of just a few 100 seems ludicrous.
But pollster John Zogby's voice in "The Way We'll Be" is disarming. He anticipates skepticism and answers potential arguments with a combination of intelligent rebuttal, winning modesty and full disclosure most the limits of his methodology.
What he describes seems a plausible (though not guaranteed) scenario for the future of the United States, its politics, culture and economic science. Even if Zogby's conclusions prove to be mistaken, the data he has collected offer plenty of fodder for discussion.
Drawing on surveys he conducted over a 20-year period, Zogby analyzed responses from all age and demographic groups. What he found was surprisingly optimistic: reason for uplift amid job layoffs, inadequate health care, rising gasoline prices, global thaw and other morale-sapping problems. "My surveying shows that we ar in the middle of a underlying reorientation of the American character," he writes, "away from wanton consumption and toward a new ball-shaped citizenry in an historic period of limited resources."
I like the well-grounded of that new universe. But I could non shake the thought that maybe Zogby is rendition data to fit his personal hopes. Or possibly people run to offer answers that sound politically correct and comport with what they believe pollsters want to hear.
Cued by Zogby's hopeful interpretation, I vowed to look for holes in his analytic thinking, as well as flaws in the premises and phrasings of his questions. But as Zogby works through his data, the vision in his crystal ball seems to hold.
He comes crossways as justifiably confident when writing that significant numbers of Americans "are less interested in luxury and extravagance than in comfort, convenience, costs, and the dictates of a growing global consciousness." For good example, when asked what values were important in their consumer decisions, 51 pct of women responding mentioned the using of child labor, 44 percent cited environmental friendliness, and 37 percent mentioned the human-rights record of the producer. Armed with such replies, Zogby confidently states that "Americans require to live in a world with other people, not in a walled empire surrounded by enemies."
At the center of this optimistic future is a group he labels the "First Globals," consisting of the current 18- to 29-year-olds across the United States. This group, he finds, is "the virtually outward-looking and accepting generation in American history." Yes, many of them ar self-absorbed and materialistic. But, Zogby says, the absolute majority of First Globals ar "far more likely than their elders to take gays and lesbians. For all practical purposes, they're the first color-blind Americans and the first to bring a consistently planetary perspective to everything from foreign insurance policy to environmental issues to the coffee tree they buy, the music they hear to and the clothes they wear."
And they feel far more connected personally to the rest of the populace. They expect to
