The Londoner

For a brief moment last month​ , ​everyone in America was interested in demographics . That’s because, in addition to rewarding the just, punishing the wicked, and certifying that America was (for the moment) not racist , President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney pointed to two ineluctable demographic truths . The first was expected: that the growth of the Hispanic-American cohort is irresistible and will radically transform our country’s ethnic future . The second caught people by surprise: that the proportion of unmarried Americans was suddenly at an all-time high. Unfortunately, by the time the window closed on the public’s demographic curiosity no one really understood either of these shifts. Or where they came from. Or whether they were even particularly true. As is often the case, people tended to fixate on a relatively small, contingent part of America’s changing demographic makeup and look past the bigger, more consequential part of the story. So let...