ABSTRACT
Declining birthrates and longer life expectancies have aged our population. Suddenly, everyone from car makers, soft-drink manufacturers, and television producers to political pollsters, pundits, and candidates have become aware of the country's changing age profile, and they are working fast to target their messages to distinct age-groups. Tremendous differences in age concentrations exist across the nation's states, regions, counties, and cities. These concentrations changed significantly during the 1980s, when the United States population was highly mobile. Since the publication of John Naisbitt's Megatrends in 1982, Florida has been viewed as a "bellwether state"—a state in which social and political invention is common. Demographers, sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians, and political scientists rarely see eye to eye when it comes to defining and labeling a generation. Age pyramids graphically display the relative size of successive generations, with the younger positioned beneath the older.
