Pi-Consulting

Winston Churchill jokingly – and affectionately – called them “Two great nations separated by a common language”. The “separation” he referred to did mean that “You say Tomaytos, and I say Tomahtos”, but that part never got in the way of the idea that here was a very “special relationship” indeed. As countries, Britain and America seem to many outside observers to form a kind of indissoluble “Anglo-Saxon Front”, resolutely seeing the world in pretty much the same way, following the same basic domestic and foreign policies, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder to see those policies enacted.

Brits and Yanks may like each other a lot, and visit each other’s countries enthusiastically come vacation time. But does this mean that the two nations share most of their fundamental attitudes? Pi has tested that thesis over several years now, and found it to be almost completely without foundation. More on that below.

Now the august British weekly newspaper The Economist has weighed in with its own findings on the subject. In March this year, they commissioned a simultaneous poll on both sides of the Atlantic, with YouGov asking the questions in the UK, and Polimetrix doing the honors in the US. A thousand respondents in each country were quizzed on their fundamental attitudes to a wide range of “things in life”. “Broadly”, reports the Economist, “the differences between the two countries look more striking than the similarities”.

The full results of the survey make fascinating reading, and can be found at www.economist.com/anglosaxon. Highlights: “The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion. …Britain is famously a post-Christian society, and Americans are …rediscovering the faith of their fathers”. “Britons are more international than the Americans, and keener on free trade and globalization”. Instinctively polarized opinions are more visible between members of the US population, with Britons more disposed to see their fellow-citizens’ point-of-view. By contrast, “Only nationalism seems to unite America’s left and right”. Just don’t look for the fervent American kind of patriotism in the UK these days. In January this year, the figure of Britannia was banished permanently from British coinage. The UK’s national flag has been reduced to a kitsch prop for noisy football fans, when not draped provocatively over the contours of a Spice Girl, or providing the backdrop to irreverent cartoons of Prince Charles looking goofy on a coffee-mug.

If doubts remain as to how different American and British attitudes can be, Pi can now dispel them. We Pi-Charted (what else?) both nations, and realized that they headed in fundamentally opposing directions on way more than half of Pi’s attitudinal measurements.

The average American professes a long-term commitment to “The American Dream”, a culture of ‘can-do’ go-getting, self-fulfillment, serious commitment to acquiring money and getting ahead. The American way is to live by your religious convictions, care what people think of you, “do the right thing” at home, trust in those in authority, and leave the rest of the world to get on with its own affairs.

The equivalent attitudes in the UK are those of short-term thinkers, restless and impulsive opportunists, with little faith or respect reserved for either Earthly or Heavenly authority. British conventionality means shoulder-shrugging resignation to an unsatisfactory state of affairs. After all, what can you do? Better to dedicate your efforts to the pursuit of fun, entertainment, and materialistic opulence.

Pi’s blogmeister is strongly reminded of the old joke about the difference between an American factory worker leaving through the factory gates on Friday night, and his British equivalent. The American watches his boss sweep by in a huge Lincoln, and says “Damn, one day, I’ll have a car like that”. The Brit watches HIS boss speed past in his Rolls Royce, and mutters “Flash git, he should be riding a bicycle like everyone else”.

Joined at the hip? We don’t think so. Pi rests its case, no foolin’.

For fifteen years, The Nielsen Company, which measures America’s TV audiences through its eponymous ratings service, has separated out Hispanic audiences for special study. In September, they announced that the separate Hispanic ratings service is to be scrapped, and that Latino homes will henceforth be counted along with panel homes of other ethnicities. This might not seem important, but it signals the moment at which one of America’s bellwether research companies saw a great truth: that Latino audiences have grown to the point that they are “just Americans like everybody else”. 12 million homes is no longer a curious minority, it’s part of the mainstream, with vast Hispanic components already evident in the TV audiences of Los Angeles, New York City, and the Miami/Fort Lauderdale conurbation, to name but three. Nativists, please note. Source: Adweek, WARC, Pi.

Parents of twenty-to-thirtysomethings are worried about their kids. Specifically, they’re worried that they are never going to leave the family home. Whose nest is it, anyway? Mum and Dad’s? Or the “Come-Back Kid’s”?

Ah, the joys of parenthood! The poor old dears have put behind them the mess, noise, turbulence and confrontations of having their teenage children at home. Now, all over Europe, the same mothers and fathers are reaching their 50s or 60s. However, ask them if the advancing years have brought them the quiet joys of being ‘empty-nesters’. They are just as likely to roll their eyes and murmur “I wish! They’re still here!”.

The number of “adultescents” still living at home is not trivial. Six out of ten British 20-to-25-year-old men are still shacking up at their parents’ place, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics. For women in their young 20s the figure is four out of ten.

Significant numbers of Italians stay single and continue living in the parental home well into their 30s and even 40s, according to TGI’s international office in Geneva. The majority pronounce themselves perfectly happy with the arrangement. The French even have a name for such people. Stay-at-home young adults are called “Tanguys”, after a 28-year-old character in a movie who flatly refuses to leave home even when formally thrown out by his despairing parents. Bizarrely, young Frenchmen have even sued those who gave them life for “failing to maintain them”.

Whether they get called Papa and Maman, Vati and Mutti, Babbo and Mamma or Papi and Mami, the parents of a grown-up son still living at home are often pitied for being stuck with a “Mummy’s Boy”, or, worse, a cynical sponger who simply wants home cooking and a rent-free lifestyle. On the other hand, some mothers cannot bear to be parted from their “darling boy”, while some older fathers seem to like having someone to watch the football with. The come-back road carries emotional traffic in both directions.

Part of what keeps the no-longer-young at home is the growing difficulty of buying a home of their own. Since today’s 30-year-olds were born, house prices in Germany have doubled, those in France have risen ten times over, and British housing prices have multiplied by an astonishing factor of 15. Only the highest-paid youngsters can buy a first home and get onto the property ladder, unless Mumsy and Dadsy are willing to step in. Well-heeled parents who want the guest bedroom reserved for their guests have therefore been contributing to their offspring’s mortgages. Britain’s Council of Mortgage Lenders reveals that 40% of UK first-time home-buyers are getting parental help with the payments.

House prices are being pushed upwards by another new demographic phenomenon, the incredible shrinking household. British government projections show that in the next 20 years the number of individual UK households rises from 21 million to 26 million, with singletons a major driving force. As with the laws of physics, against the stay-at-home-with-Mum trend there is an equal and opposite Newtonian force at work; the rise of the one-person household. The actress Greta Garbo famously said “I vant to be aloooone”, and plenty of young people are picking up her theme.

Interestingly, young unmarried European men who live by themselves seem happy with their lot, though lone single males in America appear to have doubts about it; (TGI data again). The same source suggests that divorcees under 45 are quite content to go it alone, at least they are in Germany, Italy and the UK. Divorced American women appear generally content with their decision to “wash that man right out of my hair”. In France and Spain, by contrast, young divorced and separated people profess to be unhappier about life. Splitting up with a partner can be a big reason for deciding to move back into the parental home.

One of the big questions facing the parents of a “come-back kid” is how to treat their offspring’s boyfriend/girlfriend, who often wants to move in too. Suggesting they sleep in separate bedrooms is not only logistically difficult – average dwelling sizes are shrinking – but is also likely to be a source of inter-generational friction. Some parents have adopted a “don’t let them do it at home” policy, as one of their last available negotiating tools for avoiding their children moving back home. More parents appear to expect celibate behaviour of their girl children than they do of the men, which might explain why girls are often keener to leave home than their boyfriends are.

In general, however, the parental attitude to “nookie in the nest” is a tolerant shrug of the shoulders. One explanation for this is that post-WW2 ‘baby-boomer’ parents grew up in the inter-generational battleground of the 1960s and ’70s, and remember their own parents’ disapproval of their pursuing any kind of intimacy at home. Though they are now in middle-age, ‘boomer’ Mums’ and Dads’ attitudes have stayed significantly more permissive than the starchiness of their own parents. In some cases this is because they didn’t personally benefit much from the liberality of the Swinging Sixties, and have a sneaking feeling they should have done. Either way, their children are perhaps the first twentyish generation that doesn’t necessarily have to leave home in order to have a sex life.

It is clear that these changes are not only demographic. They have powerful resonance for culture, values and attitudes. For many young people, their primal urge towards success, go-getting and independence is being weakened by a growing addiction to stability, comfort, parental cosseting and low-cost living. The longer they stay home, the harder it is to escape the enveloping nest. Some evidence suggests that parents’ concern for their children actually increases with age.

All over Western society, a significant demographic group faces an uncomfortable question: isn’t it time you grew up?

Whoever said the French are shoulder-shrugging cynics who dismiss new developments with a non-committal murmur of “Bof!” (French for “Who cares?”)? If they really were that world-weary and cynical, they wouldn’t bother to vote, right? We should therefore ponder the fact that the recent French general election, (which picked right-of-center Nicolas Sarkozy over left-of-center Segolene Royal), logged an astonishing 84% voter turnout. Britain and America barely scrape past the 60% level when it comes to turning out the vote. Given that this was the first time a female candidate had made the second-round run-off poll, it was interesting that Mr. Sarkozy not only scored 53% of the vote overall, but 52% of the female vote. So much for “women rallying behind one of their own”. Hillary-fanciers for the US 2008 election, please note. And Happy Bastille Day to all our French and French Canadian readers. Source: The Economist, Pi.

In 1900, only a tenth of world population lived in cities. Now the figure is well over half, and it looks like rising to three-quarters within another 30 years. Just 17% of Americans live outside metropolitan areas. Already more than 75% of the Japanese are townies, and the European figure is closing fast on 80%. Urbanization is increasing virtually everywhere, (except Switzerland, for some reason). The agreeable myth of country living is becoming a thing of the past, and nowhere is this truer than in the UK, which already sees an astonishing 90% of population living in towns. (Source: Pi, The Economist, Various.)