Globally, it seems parents increasingly value unique names to help children stand out instead of fit in. Read more

She hired Los Angeles celebration-of-life planner Alison Bossert — yes, those now exist — to create what West dubbed "Memorialpalooza" for her father, Howard, in 2016 a few months after his death.

"None of us is going to get out of this alive," says Bossert, who helms Final Bow Productions.

"We can't control how or when we die, but we can say how we want to be remembered."

And how Howard was remembered!

There was a crowd of more than 300 on the Sony Pictures Studios. A hot-dog cart from the famed L.A. stand Pink's. Gift bags, the hit being a baseball cap inscribed with "Life's not fair, get over it" (a beloved Howardism).

A constellation of speakers, with Jerry Seinfeld as the closer (Howard was his personal manager). And babka (a tribute to a favorite "Seinfeld" episode).

"My dad never followed rules," says West, 56, a Bay Area clinical psychologist. So why would his memorial service?

Death is a given, but not the time-honored rituals.

An increasingly secular, nomadic and casual America is shredding the rules about how to commemorate death, and it's not just among the wealthy and famous.

Somber, embalmed-body funerals, with their $9,000 industry average price tag, are, for many families, a relic.

Instead, end-of-life ceremonies are being personalized: golf-course cocktail send-offs, backyard potluck memorials, more Sinatra and Clapton, less "Ave Maria," more Hawaiian shirts, fewer dark suits.

Families want to put the "fun" in funerals.

The movement will only accelerate as the nation approaches a historic spike in deaths.

Baby boomers, despite strenuous efforts to stall the aging process, are not getting any younger.

In 2030, people over 65 will outnumber children, and by 2037, 3.6 million people are projected to die in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, 1 million more than in 2015, which is projected to outpace the growth of the overall population.

Just as nuptials have been transformed — who held destination weddings in the '90s? — and gender-reveal celebrations have become theatrical productions, the death industry has experienced seismic changes over the past couple of decades.

Practices began to shift during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when many funeral homes were unable to meet the needs of so many young men dying, and friends often hosted events that resembled parties.

Now, many families are replacing funerals (where the body is present) with memorial services (where the body is not).

Religious burial requirements are less a consideration in a country where only 36 percent of Americans say they regularly attend religious services, nearly a third never or rarely attend, and almost a quarter identify as agnostic or atheist, according to the Pew Research Center. Continue reading

• Image: Eve

But it's also necessary.

As the baby boomers age, our population will become disproportionately elderly, with a dependency ratio of about 2.6 people aged between 15 and 64 for every person aged 65 and over in 2036, and 2.31 in 2061.

This "pig-in-the-python", as it's been evocatively described [pdf] by the Royal Society, will pass - but a productive workforce and more young people will certainly help it along.

The generation gap is considerably less marked amongst the Pasifika and Maori populations (which also have higher fertility rates), which means it's even more important to tackle issues like unemployment, poverty and obesity in which they're over-represented.

But with fewer women having children, the fertility rate is currently 2.0, only just above the "replacement level" necessary for the population to replace itself in the long-term without migration.

By 2030 it's predicted to eclipse five million, and so much of that growth is dependent on migration from other countries.

That change is already visible in Auckland, where half a million people were born overseas, and is expected to continue as migration encourages migration: people are more likely to move to places where they know others and where their culture is established.

The most rapid growth has been in the city's Asian population, with one in four Aucklanders of Asian ethnicity.

That's predicted to be one in three by 2021.

Dr Andrew Butcher, director of research at the Asia New Zealand Foundation, points out that statistic encompasses "multiple languages, beliefs, cultures, cuisines and all the rest".

"This isn't a homogenous group of people, and it's not a discrete entity of people, either," he says. "There are increasing numbers of Asians who are multi-ethnic … so there's this great diversity." Continue reading

Sources

• The Wireless
• Image: Found Directory

Your first home has never been more out of reach, if you want to live in one of the main centres - not that we have much of a choice, because high rates of unemployment and thousands of dollars of student debt mean we go where the jobs are.

Even then, we're faced with increasing costs of living and slow wage growth.

In short, our prospects are bleak, and especially so in comparison to the rosy route enjoyed by members of our parents' generation. And economist Bernard Hickey can't figure out why we're not more angry about it.

We face a political contest between the people who have to pay the bill, and the people who receive the benefits, and that is building into a clash of the generations

He calls us the "baby bust" generation: burdened by debt, held apart from home ownership, the losers of sweeping changes imposed by Roger Douglas' Labour government in the mid-1980s.

The baby boomers, meanwhile, continue to benefit from the free education and cheap property they had access to as young people.

Hickey predicts this gap between the older and younger generations will get bigger in the coming decades, before eventually coming to a head when the last of the boomers retire, and their children are left to foot the bill for their healthcare and superannuation.

"Ten, 20 years from now, the younger generation will realise they face a future of not … being as wealthy as their parents'," he says.

"We face a political contest between the people who have to pay the bill, and the people who receive the benefits, and that is building into a clash of the generations." Continue reading.

Source: The Wireless

Image: Stuff

More than half the world's population—now lives in societies where the fertility rate has been dropping, like a stone in some places, for decades. Among demographers, the prevailing narrative for this sea change in human affairs talks of economic development finished off by cultural change. As countries grow wealthier and more urban, with higher levels of education for women, as well as men, women naturally wish to have fewer children; add in access to safe and effective means to that end—contraception and abortion—and that's precisely what they do.

True enough, but not the whole truth, argues Harvard demographer Michael Teitelbaum, co-author (with Yale historian Jay Winter) of The Global Spread of Fertility Decline. At the core of the change, Teitelbaum believes, lies the rational belief of young adults—especially the highly educated, those most aware of the weak points in their society's institutions—that they live in "risk societies." The risks they see can reach to the apocalyptic (will there be another Chernobyl, another 9/11, how many more Lac-Mégantics?) to macroeconomic pessimism (can today's social welfare entitlements last?) to individual concerns(will we ever be able to own a house?). Marriage- and child-aversion are among their risk-management strategies. Continue reading

Sources

• MacLean's
• Image: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

He says they just expressed it in different ways.

He said while baby boomers and their children were the ones most likely not to belong to a church because they struggled with the institution of church and its formality, "They still have a sense of the unknown, the mystery, the wonder of life. They may still have a sense there may well be a God, or not know what it is but a power greater than us."

He says he understands the public's scepticism of religion and its leaders because of inappropriate conduct and behaviour across denominations.

"There is no excuse, every leader who preaches the Bible needs to adhere to the Bible."

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: Sunlive.co.nz

In normal times, millions of people get married in their mid-to-late 20s. They spend lots of money on a wedding. They buy a car, often with a loan. They buy a house, always with a loan. They buy new furniture and appliances. With their time and money coupled, expenses that were once extraneous now feel reasonable. Maybe he was individually satisfied with sports bars and she with Netflix, but as a couple, it makes more sense to watch live sports and TV shows on their new couch, and so they buy cable. They have a kid, or more than a few. You know how the story goes.

DELAY, DELAY, DELAY.

Before the Great Recession, young people were already saving many of these activities for later in their lives. The share of young adults (18-29) who were married fell from 59% to 20% between 1960 and 2010. These couples bought houses later, too. "A decline in the incidence of marriage mechanically lowers home ownership," Martin Gervais and Jonas D.M. Fisher wrote in their paper "Why Has Home Ownership Fallen Among the Young?" Read more

Sources

• Derek Thompson in The Atlantic
• Image: Hemmy.net

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic.