Now, baby boomers will follow Daniel Yankelovich

Daniel Yankelovich, the groundbreaking opinion pollster who retired to La Jolla but continued working, died Friday morning (September 22) at 92.

The New York Times said that he not only tracked people's car and toothpaste preferences but also tried to understand values and goals of ordinary people — "what made them feel moral, happy or fulfilled, or miserable and marginalized in an affluent but impersonal society."

Yankelovich was one of the first to follow baby boomers and wrote of the generation gap of the 1960s, women's movement of the 1970s, neoconservatism of the 1980s and "me first" self-indulgence of the 1990s.

In 2012, he founded the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California at San Diego and later endowed it with a multimillion-dollar bequest. In recent years he lived at White Sands, a retirement community in La Jolla.