The Pig in the American Python : AGE WAVE The Challenges and Opportunities of an Aging America <i> by Ken Dychtwald Ph.D. and Joe Flower (Jeremy Tarcher: $19.95; 380 pp.) </i>

“Nothing’s happening!” a Washington Post-style columnist, Henry Allen, lamented in print a few weeks ago. An unsettling calm, he wrote, lies upon America. Suddenly, near the end of our tumultuous century, there are no upheavals, revolutions, spooky or kooky fads, “Hegelian heroes,” romantic Angst, or towering passions. We even temper our distress over drugs, Allen wrote, with comforting reminders that drug use is no longer spreading. “What happens to a society based on change,” he asked, “when it begins to suspect there is no change?”

The answer to that question is easy: society changes anyway.

If today Americans are refusing to be drawn into a national passion about any one issue, I think we will find that this is because we are beginning to absorb the first vibrations of a change without precedent in our history--our passage from a young to a middle-aged society.

In this decade, our over-65 population came to outnumber our teen-agers for the first time. And two years ago the leading edge of the post-World War II baby boom generation (those born between 1946 and 1961) entered its forties. This generation, 76 million strong, is one-third of our population today. By contrast, the share of the population ages 20 to 29 will drop from today’s 18% to 13% in the next decade.

The ramifications of these statistics are the topic of Dr. Ken Dychtwald’s book, “Age Wave,” written with Joe Flower. Dychtwald, a consultant on the business and social problems raised by our new demographics, roams the whole landscape of modern life to explore the transformation that will be wrought by America’s becoming middle-age.

Do we instinctively resist the notion of a phenomenon such as the aging of the baby boom generation forever altering the way America shops, plays, works and loves? Dychtwald demolishes that resistance early on: the boomers, he reminds us in his first chapter, are a generational mass that has “dominated American culture for four decades.” Its profile in our society has been “likened by demographers to ‘a pig moving through a python.’ ”

If, on top of the boomers’ influence, you add the continuing increase in longevity and the still-declining birth rate, the future face of America begins to look gloriously wrinkled indeed.

I say “gloriously” because Dychtwald (at 38, himself part of the pig in the python) is so upbeat about the outlook and supports his most significant assertions with data and research from such competent sources. Here are a few items from “Age Wave” that, if you are over 40, ought to make your day:

* “The boomers are the ‘youth’ generation. . . . In the years to come, entire industries will rise and fall in response to this anti-aging, pro-longevity obsession.” (That should drive up the stock prices of cosmetics firms and drive down the cost of their products.)

* “Recent research from the National Institute on Aging suggests that many of the problems of old age are not due to aging at all, but rather to improper care of the body over a lifetime. . . . What many of us call aging is instead a lifestyle issue.”

* “The power of older America will snowball. In the 1986 elections, for the first time in American history, the oldest group of voters (65 and older) outnumbered the youngest group (18-24) . . . voters and politicians may be more likely to focus on issues pertaining to the second half of life and less focused on concerns of the young.”

* “The 60 million Americans over 50--one-fourth of the total U.S. population--will turn out to be the most powerful and affluent consumer group in American history. (They) currently have a combined personal income of over $800 billion and control 70% of the total net worth of U.S. households--nearly $7 trillion of wealth.”

Most interesting to me are Dychtwald’s predictions for our future work and retirement behavior. “The gift of longevity and the added years it brings will cause us to rethink the pace and temper of our lives,” he writes. “We will soon find ourselves cycling in and out of several different careers throughout our lives, each interspersed with periods of rest, recreation, retraining and personal reflection.”

Some statistics suggest this “cyclic life” scenario, as Dychtwald calls it, and I hope he is right--but I truly wonder if we shall achieve this self-actualized nirvana in the lifetime of anyone who is now an adult. And this is a weakness (but not a flaw) in Dychtwald’s book. More bothersome to me is that about halfway through I began to feel I was reading a motivational or self-help book. This sadly diluted the impact of the very profound facts he is discussing.

Besides fooling observers like Henry Allen into declaring that “nothing is happening,” the silent inexorability of America’s aging has allowed us to ignore its likely effects on the vast structure of law, regulation and social services that we have constructed in the name of “rights” and “security.”

Dychtwald touches on the unhappy potential by noting predictions of “intergenerational strife” (as have a scattering of articles in recent periodicals), but then he wisely backs off. This is a complicated mine field, and he knows it.

I first saw many of the labor force statistics that buttress Dychtwald’s scenario when I arrived at my desk as U.S. Secretary of Labor in 1987. Two studies were waiting for me--one was “Project 2000” done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the other was the Hudson Institute’s “Workforce 2000,” a private study commissioned by the Labor Department.

Thanks to the 1988 presidential campaign, some of the facts in those studies leaped into the spotlight to advance the “cyclic” scenario:

- Two-thirds of the new entrants to the labor force in the 1990s will be women--making child care, parental and family leave, and flexible workplaces all issues;

- A gap is growing between the skills demanded by new jobs and the skills possessed by our current and future work force--making education and training an issue;

- The labor force is getting older, growing more slowly, and losing more workers to early retirement, presaging labor shortages and more opportunity for traditionally disadvantaged groups--making work availability and preparedness for minorities, immigrants and welfare mothers an issue.

But the aging of America, though inseparable from all those issues, did not itself become an “issue.” Why not? Because “issues” are clear, categorical problems that demand “solutions,” and how does government “solve” getting older? Can candidates debate the march of time?

As one 1988 presidential candidate, former governor Pete Du Pont of Delaware, can testify, projections can be difficult to sell in political argument. Du Pont, you remember, tried to make the future of Social Security an issue. Though he skillfully avoided both scare tactics and sounding like a master planner, he could not surmount the fact that the program is secure right now. Policy rationales may crumble under pressure, but which ones will they be and when will we start to see cracks? We are only beginning to find out.

I would quibble with some of Dychtwald’s ideas about our future “lifestyles” (a word he uses too often and with too little regard for whether he means behavior or values). And I cringed a little at his final chapter which I suspect resulted from someone suggesting that he throw in some moral reflections. (I find it hard to believe that Monsignor Charles Fahey and the Hobbit “Smaegol” in “The Lord of the Rings” have the same concept of an inner life.) But those are only irritants in a book that cannot help but provoke wide interest.

At least I hope it will. I really hate the thought of having to keep arguing against the idea that “nothing is happening.”