College freshmen’s materialism tripled across three decades while civic priorities halved

Evidence

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the boomers entered college, 45–50 percent of them rated keeping up-to-date with politics and helping clean up the environment as very important personal objectives, compared with roughly 40 percent of them who rated “being very well off financially” that high. By 1998, as the last of the X’ers entered college, three decades of growing materialism had reduced ratings for politics and the environment to 26 percent and 19 percent, respectively, while financial well-being had shot up to a rating of 75 percent. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 893